The Black Dog vs. Ice-Cream

The Valley of the Iron God.

2012-01-09T10:43:00.003Z

Click image to embiggen.

Hey. I said I’d draw Conan next, but I got really itchy to finish a drawing in a single weekend, so I picked up this (which I’d started last year.) Since about the summer, I’ve been doing various commissions for my friends which all involved pretty girls as robot-fighting ninjas, cat-faced socialites and soon-to-be-married lovelies. So I took Friday and Saturday and Sunday as a chance to do a manly doodle all of my own to offset all that. Looking back through my Flickr, I’m unhappy with just about everything I’ve drawn ever, but for now at least, I’m happy with this one. Bit of a deliberate riff on Herge, and with the Iron God, I’ve tried to tip my hat to Moebius as well. The giants of Gallic Comic Bookery.

Captain Bear, as you probably know, first appeared here:

Somehow, this is all part of the Skullcopica (http://monsterworkcomicbooks.blogspot.com/) universe, for anyone who cares.

I should probably do my End of Year, yeah?

The Jordan Catalano School of Seduction.

2011-12-31T14:46:00.007Z

Hey. So I’m, like, Angela Chase. I’m in this show, which is mostly about me. If you’re watching it when you’re, like, 16, you’re going to overlook how much of a brat I am and set a ridiculous romantic precedent for girlfriends and you’re going to expect everything to be profound but also, like, ‘I can so relate to that’. If you’re watching it again as a grown-up or whatever, then you’ll realise my dad Graham (who we all call ‘Gram’ by the way) is totally the best character in the show. Pirate Graham is totally the best.

Anyway. There’s this guy. Jordan. Oh my god. He’s the most incredible guy I’ve ever met. Ever. Here’s why.

1. When I want to go and talk to him, after we’ve been sort of seeing each other. He says stuff like ‘You’re crowding me,’ and then ignores me. SWOON FACTOR 7/10

2. He told me not having sex with him ‘is abnormal.’ SWOON FACTOR 9/10

3. I invited him to meet my parents. And he stood me up in front of them and it was really embarrassing and I had to go and cry. SWOON FACTOR 10/10

4. He wears these big trousers and this sheepskin jacket that you know must really stink. He can’t have washed it. Ever. SWOON FACTOR 6/10

5. He only ever seems to talk about Tino. Who quit the band. Jordan’s in a band, and Tino quit. SWOON FACTOR 7/10

Oh this is Brian. He’s trying to lend me his bike or help me with something or whatever. He’s so selfish and he doesn’t understand people at all. EWWW FACTOR 100/100

Back to Jordan...

6.He doesn’t know what day it is. Even when it’s New Year’s Eve. SWOON FACTOR 8/10

7.He had sex with my best friend. SWOON FACTOR 10/10

So anyway. I just thought I'd share that. I should probably go and listen to some Stone Temple Pilots now. They're this band I like. (I say so in Episode 4.)

Oh, and I think Juliana Hatfield is like, a ghost or an angel or something.

His Face Was Absurdly Handsome

2011-09-26T22:17:00.022+01:00

I should warn you now, the formatting on this thing is almost as bad as my prose.

Bandwagon. What's the internet for, if not for chiming in, late-to-the-party, and having a dig at something everyone loves?

Many (New) Moons ago, I did my very best to describe the Twilight movie to my darling friend Niki, and finally hit upon it's genius. I'd marvelled at just how uneventful it was while I watched it, a little confused as to what made it such a phenomenon. It was a dull, cold film about a girl who does a little sick in her mouth every time she speaks. She falls in love with a vampire and angst ensues. But then, in the Story Office the next day, as I relayed what happened, it (Breaking) dawned upon me: Twilight is fucking insane. It's held together by the greyest and slowest and wettest of threads, but - as made clear by all the WTFs above Niki's head - it's still batshit. I was smitten.

So I read up. I read the myriad miserable interviews with Robert Pattinson (who had descended so deep into self-parody that the fake Twitter I set up for him was forever bested any time someone from Vanity Fair asked him anything.) I read frankly brilliant blogs on the books. I read Aziz Ansari liveblogging as he watched the movie... I read and read and then chuckled and said 'Fursplode!' a lot and it was all rather cute and unbecoming of a bearded man.

I didn't read the actual books though.

Mainly because whenever I found them in a charity shop, I felt far too self-conscious to take them to the counter. What if someone saw, and didn't pick up on my oh-so-knowing, condescending bullshit? It could be the crucial disqualifier. 'He was hott and his denim sleeves were rolled up, but then he bought the Stephenie Meyer book, so I went out with an Indie Guitarist instead.'

BUT! In new job, with new office and new friends fate decided to lend me ALL FOUR...FIVE?...BOOKS.

So. After all that preamble. Beginning today. Tonight......The Saga Begins.

TWILIGHT
By Stephenie Meyer.

PREFACE

Like an episode of Alias - we get the hook in. Somewhere, sometime, someone comes face to face with the man who might kill her. And is really calm and not really all that bothered about it.

'I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly at me.'

As well as pleasant looks, the hunter also 'saunters'. We find out that the narrator is - pretty sure it's Bella - is dying to save someone else. Or something. Might be dying. But not fussed about it.

CHAPTER 1: FIRST SIGHT.

It begins. This is Bella. She's moving from Arizona to Forks, this really rainy place in, like, Washington State. It's a big deal. First paragraph, we get the sad juxtaposition of what she's wearing now - her favourite shirt, all eyelet lace and sleeveless sleeves - and what she'll have to wear when she lands. A Parka. God.

Not sure why she's moving. Her mum, Renee, tells her she doesn't have to go. Her mum looks just like her 'except with short hair and laughter lines.' She's also irratic and harebrained and Bella worries how she will fend for herself. Then Bella's reassured: there's food in the fridge back home. I'm a little worried for Renee. That food in the fridge won't last forever. After that the poor woman might resort to cracking open birdfeeders and dustbins along neighbouring porches. Why are you leaving her, Bella? No idea. She's on the plane. The mum is as good as dead.

In Forks lives Bella's dad, Charlie Swan of the Forks Sherriff's Police Squad. I feel kinda sorry for Charlie. Bella gives a bit of thought to him, but she's got bigger issues: her winter wardrobe. Most of her Arizona clothes are 'too permeable for Washington'. She's been forced to buy wet-weather clothes. And OMG, they totally fit in the trunk of the truck without any problems. Way too few clothes going on. This is bad news.

Still, Charlie's done a nice thing and bought her a truck, off some Billy dude they knew when she used to go fishing. Bella's all 'Ooh, a car,' but doesn't really want to think about Charlie's old pal; she 'does a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things' from her memory. Leads me to wonder what Billy got up to on them trips. Maybe he just looked old and ugly. Bella probably hated that.

Turns out the car Charlie bought is, like, a hundred years old. But Bella's not one 'to look a free truck in the mouth, or engine'. She's also not one to phrase that line so it actually works. Bella also lets us know she's like her dad in that she doesn't like expressing her emotions out loud. Probably a good thing, as when she finally sees the truck Charlie's bought her, she gets all excited and imagines it at the scenes of accidents, 'paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.' Best keep that one to yourself, I don't think Charlie will be much happy with 'Thanks dad, I totally plan to kill Renault drivers with this beast.'

After picturing the car carnage, Bella's mood sours. It took only one trip to get all her luggage upstairs. Ugh! Srsly? And that's without servants. That's just her carrying her bags and her parka and all that shit. Worse yet, she has to share her bathroom with her father, something she doesn't want to dwell on. I can't tell if this is because Bella has no idea what it's like to live in the same building as another person (she later calls it 'the communal bathroom'), or poor Charlie has something really wrong going on inside him. Still, 'one of the best things about Charlie is he doesn't hover.' So until Charlie Swan gets his jetpack, Bella will still forgive him.

So Bella's home. In Forks. She gets into her bedroom, unpacks. Bella's glad to be alone and doesn't have to fake smile anymore. She has a little cry, but doesn't go on a 'real crying jag' because she's too busy. Big cry she saves until bedtime. Like, she actually plans that.

Bella starts thinking about school tomorrow and is worried, because she doesn't have a tan. Being ivory skinned and slender, she anticipates the other pupils will single her out as a freak. Yup. Bella is most definitely a girl. When she finally gets to school, she seems bummed out that there aren't metal detectors on the doors, like the last place she went. I can't tell if she's unhappy because the locals can be trusted, or because she thinks hillbillies will wander the corridors with axes and revolvers. What kind of dump is this? Back in Arizona the kids had Porsches and Mercedeses. In the car lot at her new school, there's a shiny Volvo. A VOLVO, ffs.

Turns out her skin fits in. Everyone is pale. Although Bella manages to flush 'tomato red' at one point. Tomato red. Her face was the colour of - what - Spider-Man's mask? Maybe Bella is right about being a freak, if she routinely turns into Fire-Engine Face.

So Bella finds school boring because she's read all the books on the entire curriculum and these backwards country kids haven't. She meets a guy called Eric - 'a gangly boy with skin problems (worse than turning the colour of ketchup?) and hair as black as an oil slick.' He's nice to her, but being from the country, Eric doesn't understand sarcasm. Bella is exasperated. This is hell on earth. Bella smiles at him. 'Vaguely'.

Other people are nice to Bella, and she doesn't even bother remembering their names. She goes on and on about how forgettable they are. There's a girl - short, curly hair. Turns out her name is Jessica - so she's the Anna Kendrick part in the movie. The forgettable girl.

Anyway. This is the whole 'First Sight' bit coming up. Bella follows Jennifer or Jessica or whatever this boring-ass bitch is called to the lunch hall. And that's when she first sees them.

There's five of them. Not eating. Not talking. Also, crucially, not looking at her 'unlike most of the other students.' They don't look anything alike, apparently. There's three boys and two girls. Of the boys there are:

Big guy - like, weightlifter big. Dark and Curly hair.
Tall and lean but muscular also. (So, that's alike.) Honey blonde hair.
Lanky, less bulky. Boyish. Bronze hair.

And of the girls, there are:
Tall and statuesque, like a swimsuit model. Golden hair.
Thin - 'in the extreme' - small features. Cropped, black hair.

All of them are pale. Paler than all the pale people in the book so far. They have bruised eyes and angular features. Their noses are 'straight, perfect, angular'. It's obvs that these are the vampires. So who ever went round biting has a thing for noses? Or does being a vampire do something to your nose? Like, you expect the thing with the teeth, but actually, the nose gets pointy too. All of them are 'devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful.' America's Next Top Vampire.

The boyish one - EDWARD CULLEN - swoon - locks eyes with Bella for an instant, and then tears up a bagel with his fingers. Also, his 'mouth moves very quickly', his 'perfect lips barely opening.' It isn't clear if he's eating. What the fuck is he doing? This can't be attractive.

Jessica explains they are all the adopted kids of the young and handsome Dr. Cullen. Bella reflects that there are two 'Jessica's in her history class back home. What sort of boring, unoriginal nice person has just latched on to Bella? This is the worst school ever. Couldn't Jessica have had the decency to chop her name into something catchy, like Bella did? Yeah, Essica.

Bella checks out Edward. It turns out Essica has hit on Edward and been shot down, the sour grapes-eating loser. Bella bites her lip to hide her smile, but Edward doesn't look at her again. He gets out of the lunch hall pretty sharpish. But that's okay, because when Bella gets to her science class, there he is. SAT NEXT TO THE ONLY EMPTY SEAT. OMG. Bella shuffles over to him, but Edward goes 'rigid' (ummm. What?) and looks at her with 'an expression of hostility and fury'. Bella trips over, for, like, the third time. When she sits next to him, Edward averts his face, 'like he'd smelled something bad.' Bella checks - she smells like strawberries. What is this guy on?

Bella's already learned all this science shit already. Fucking shiny Volvo simpletons. Edward sits all lesson with a clenched fist, until the bell goes and he fluidly fucks off in an instant.'

He was so mean. It wasn't fair."

After class, a guy called Mike, with the spikes, is nice to Bella. But he lets slip that Edward has never been that shitty to anyone before. He must really, really hate strawberries. Mike doesn't hate strawberries. 'If I was lucky enough to sit by you, I would have talked to you.' Mike? Are you still here? I zoned out. I'm Bella and I'm used to nice and admiring types. Yawn. Next. Whatever.

Bella goes off to some office next and - I don't believe it - Edward is there too. He's noisly banging on about changing his science class because he absolutely can't go to that same class ever again. Edward's got his back to Bella, but he must haved got a whiff of that Strawberry scent, because he stiffens again and then exits post-haste. Bella gets one last glimpse of him - "He was absurdly handsome, with piercing, hate-filled eyes," and then he's gone.

We end the chapter with Bella in her gift truck mouth horse thing, fighting back the tears.

*sob*

So that's Chapter One. Poor Bella. Uprooted, and now having to deal with someone who didn't instantly like her and start following her around. Join us at some point for maybe another chapter of this. Weeks from now. Maybe.

x

Trigger's Broom.

2011-08-28T14:03:00.004+01:00

I’ll try and be brief. I certainly won’t go for ninety minutes, plus extra time, injury time, penalties. Plus a half-hour of charmless punditry on either end, and one in the middle when you break for jaffa cakes.

Sport.

I feel like I’m missing out.
I feel like I’m missing one obvious clue, one synapse firing puzzle-piece. The same way I can look at trees, hills, the platypus and the baby sloth and not see the guiding hand of some big man in a chair in the sky, I can look at Sky Sports and not see whatever it is that makes my brother get so cross when someone loses to somewhere. I can’t see whatever it is that makes my mum cheer and clap when the chap in the white with the headband misses the thing and it hits the bit.

I can see the joy in participating. I used to love the odd game of seven-a-side I’d play on a Sunday with those lads from HMV. I wasn’t much good, but there was exercise, endorphins, a sense of achievement and the satisfaction of being much bigger and much more solid than a few Filipino kids. The satisfaction of feeling like something out of a Robert E. Howard story as I smashed them against the boards and trod their calves under the plastic blades of my Umbros. The struggle and the triumph was something I actively took part in. I didn’t just pick a point on a map and call it ‘us’ and ‘we’ and watch from the corner of the pub. I strapped on my shin pads and went out and did all I could for myself and the five other lads chosen by a guy who lost a coin toss.

What I can’t understand, AT ALL, is how this sort of thing makes anyone feel anything:
Somewhere You’ve Never Lived: 2 – Bunch of People From All Over The Place: 5

Unless you:
1. Own the bunch of people.
2. One, or all of them are your offspring
3. You put money on one of these squads to win.
4. Shrapnel is lodged in your brain.

I get caught up on the paradox. What are you supporting, when it’s had 17 new heads and 14 new handles? I can just about see how watching it play out might be entertaining. What I absolutely can’t fathom is how a text message that says “Gunners 2-0 down’ could stir any kind of reaction out from even the most manic of minds. How does reading a paper, or a scoreboard, without any experience of the battle that delivered those numbers do anything to you? I know it does. I’ve seen it countless times: the dismay or delight as digits display. I don’t get it.

I get the Panini Sticker Album bit. That was ace. Totally understand that bit.

When I went to Primary School in Tooting we played football in the playground, but no one ever mentioned Football Clubs. I don’t think I knew anyone who supported anyone. It was just a game we played, and to me the idea that anyone watched grown-ups play the same game on the telly or in stadiums never entered my head. It would be like SKY having a channel that was just people playing Hide n’ Seek, or Forty-Forty. When I turned up in Orpington, I felt uprooted, and wanted to fit in. Richard McKnight asked me which team I supported, and when I told him I didn’t know, he told me I supported Liverpool. So I did. He also told me to show Alison Shepherd my willy. So I did. Football was a much bigger deal out in BR6 – the school played it on mud, in proper sessions, with adult supervision and rules and whistles and special outfits and stuff. The Cubs did too. I’d play in parks. There were leagues. The results of the games were recorded and people remembered how well they did.

I wasn’t really much good. Chicken or the egg on whether that’s because I preferred indoorsy, escapist things like drawing or writing or watching movies or playing video games or reading comics, or I drifted to all those things because I wasn’t good at sport. Then I ended up in a Secondary School where they didn’t even play Football. They played Rugby, which was even worse because you can’t even enjoy playing it, let alone watching it. Great, savage inhumans with heads like car batteries wrapped in plasticine ramming into each other for a strange pellet that can’t travel forwards. It’s a nightmarish contest of mutants and mud. I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a scrum with their trunk-like faces pressed into me, nor would I want to endorse the exploitation of such disfigured blobs from a stadium seat. Their desperate, accusing eyes squinting out from crevasses in their bulbous, bony blocks: ‘Why am you make me play?’

I’m being a snob, of course. Which is an important part of why sport doesn’t sit well with me. A lot of it is championed by people I did not, or would not have liked at school. Brash, cocksure, moronic jocks, or braying, privileged, moronic poshos. The personalities in professional sport seem (at a glance, I’ll admit) to be a mix of dull or bastard, much like 90% of people I didn’t want to know when I wore a blazer with a badge on it.

I’m being a bit unfair and narrow-minded. And rightly so, as this is my soapbox. I’m only really thinking of Football when I write this. The Premier League, to be precise. A stereotype of a lad with a pink tie and large knot in it being caught out with a really rather rank prostitute. I turn my nose up at that sort of thing. Especially when their Abbey Clancy or equivalent stands by them as if it was part-and-parcel of their love-life. In Italy, things might be different – a more exciting class of game, with players that dress well and have style and other things that I tend to value over tactical thinking and athleticism. Although I imagine they still have the affairs.

So what of the other options? Golf has Ian Fleming and Sean Connery in its corner, and has a certain throwback, side-parting and slacks quality. Nevertheless, it’s an absolute bore to watch. I once worked for a sports broadcaster. Of a lunchtime, Golf commentators would use the VT machines in the office to practice their narration, before heading into the suites to commit to recording. I’d sit through blobby soundbites like:

“In the approaching gloom, Nick Faldo’s accuracy...”
Cue pause as man in Rupert Bear trousers knocks a Slazenger away from a wall of fog.
“...shone like a beacon.”

And while I can see myself enjoying the outdoors in preppy menswear (though perhaps not in the pringle and patterned garb ) I don’t imagine I can actually play it. It does rather seem like there’s a lot to judge and process before each swing. A shame all the precision in the world can’t make it the least bit spectacular.

I think Cricket follows on from this. I like the idea of something so old fashioned - images of picnics and gentlemen and Kent - but television translates it to a quiet, uneventful game that seems to happen miles and miles into the centre of an ocean of short grass. Tiny white figures bowling and batting in gargantuan amphitheatres, occasionally giving up a cheer as something is caught and, over in an adjacent time zone, a polite applause goes out from the stadium seats. I think I also dislike the way ‘hero’ was bandied about after England won the Ashes, as though bringing a tiny trophy to our shores was akin to storming the beach at Normandy. Honours all round for a bunch of people who managed to do their jobs without fucking up. Oh, Bravo. And I’m not going to play it either, as for the most part that means launching a leather missile at dogwalkers, pushchairs and joggers, until someone is killed.

Athletics. Well, there’s a certain purity to the accomplishments involved in athletics. Individual skill, strength, agility, ability. A person is the fastest, throws the furthest, leaps the highest, and there’s very little disputing the prowess involved. That said the curmudgeon in me can’t stomach all that feel-good, unifying, common-man claptrap that has proceeded the Olympics for the last million months. London will not be transformed into some utopia of inspired, kindly, community-minded Joe Publics. Instead the London Underground will become a network of concrete arteries, boiling with fat and grim, oily waste. Bodies will wash up on the South Bank, wrapped in bootleg T-shirts. They’ll take the torch and burn down more furniture stores in Croydon.

Motor-racing. International Playboys in glamorous cities, dealing with life or death instincts at 200 miles an hour? Or a sooty, repetitive, indistinct contest where ugly, identical can-opener cars orbit a twisty bit of road for what seems like all of every Sunday ever? I really, really want to like motor-racing...but no.

Tennis. Ah, well, Tennis. It’s preppy. Although I’m picturing more scenes from The Royal Tennenbaums then I am real-life figures from Tennis lore. And it’s gladiatorial. I like that. Except it’s just as difficult to root for a man you don’t know as it is a town you don’t live in. I’m not going to blindly follow a player because he’s English, because he may well be an idiot, or a prick and I’m not in the habit of cheering either on. Surely personality matters more than passports? For once I recognise what’s so thrilling about the sport, but without anyone to champion, it just doesn’t hold my attention. I’d still much rather use that time to draw, or watch Hayley Atwell from the tree outside her house.

But it does rather leave me without some things that I really do love. First of all; event television. I like the talking point, ‘Did you see?’ as a concept, but in practice I’m almost always out of luck. For some months now I’ve been without broadband and rarely got home in time to watch anything. I have missed out on both ‘The Hour’ and ‘Torchwood’ where I know I would have had at least one person to go ‘Did you see...?’ with, and had that sense of the shared enjoyment I miss. Furthermore, I’m as likely to enjoy The Apprentice as I am a genuine Job Interview with an angry grey bollock, so no office banter for me there, either.

The other thing is - being in a gang. I think that’s the best way I can explain it. I’ve always wanted to be part of a defined gang. In the last few years, like a child, I have given name (and membership cards) to two groups of friends of mine, for reasons I don’t fully understand. Instead of going to the cinema with X and Y, ‘The Dead Fish’ assembled. Where one might see a bunch of old school friends and their girlfriends out to dinner, I saw ‘The Feast of Empires Club’ convening. It’s probably all rather needy and smothering, but I relish the thought of belonging to something more than a ragtag handful of people who have one another’s phone numbers. I’ve never been on holiday with a group of friends – no cottage, or villa or chalet shared, and now I’m of an age where my peers are all settling down, I can’t see it ever happening. Of course, sport doesn’t really give you this, or when it does, it’s a pack of inbreds throwing garden furniture about in Bareclona. Nevertheless, sport provides a badge, a shared experience, drama – between friends. I think that’s the bit I covet. I think it would be good to think in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’ every once in a while.

Though there’s the Soap Awards, I guess.

Wait, Rose.

2011-08-02T09:32:00.004+01:00

I am not quick-witted.

Do I get to say I’m deadpan, considered, dry? I might just be slow. The cogs turning. The one good joke landing, rather than crashing, just before the moment’s completely gone. Being a writer’s one of the ways to compensate, I suppose. I have the freedom to edit and refine. (Not that this blog ever shows much evidence of that.) But real life? It’s not so much ‘staircase wit’ as stuck in the lift during a power-cut.

There’s no punchline to this.

I’m in Waitrose, the John Barnes one, North Finchley. A rapping footballer; honoured by a supermarket. The layout’s strange. There’s no natural start point. There’s alcoves. Like a Cluedo board, with Cava and Halloumi instead of lead pipes and daggers. I’m doubling back on myself trying to determine which aisle will have dried figs (Cut a camembert in half, like a burger bun. Press the figs into the lower half and then restore the top.) – I’d thought Nuts and Snacks, then tried Fresh Fruit and Veg and...well, it’s not important. I don’t want to spoil the adventure for you. So, figs found, I make my way towards bread. Professor Plum is there with the scones. As I pass the aisle with the hummus, a girl – arms full of party snacks – loses a bag of crisps. They topple off the tower she’s struggling with. It takes her a moment while she thinks what to do about it. The staff are doing some sort of stock-take so when she looks around for help, everyone’s facing the shelves, little scanners accounting for all the crème fraiche. While she’s had this little awkward process (what’s happened – what to do about it – who can help?) I’ve had the time to think about what to do. I pick up the crisps and cautiously, waiting for some kind of permission, deliver them back to their cradle.

‘Listen, do you want me to grab you a basket?’

She looks at mine, like the concept is new to her. To be fair, I’m swinging it just to make sure she matches ‘basket’ the word, to ‘basket’ the object. Rose, I’ll call her Rose. Rose gives it a thought and then declines. She can make it. I don’t press the issue. I’m conscious this could all be quite patronising. It’s meant as good will. So I bid her good luck and I go and look at cordials. Eventually I head to the check out. Pay. Go.

Outside I see Rose again. I have my iPod on now, but I saw her in good time so I’ve managed to get a smile going. Smiles take a while. With no exaggerating, I can tell you a vending machine will dispense your selection before I’ve managed to tug the sides of my mouth up. The can of Sprite, the Biscuit and Raisin Yorkie that is my smile is present. Rose is goofy, blushing. I can tell she’s saying thank you, despite John Williams and Ewoks and the Battle of Endor going off in my ear. I’m saying ‘You’re welcome,’ – though without turning off my music, I can’t really hear it. I’ve probably said it with that yoghurt-thick pronunciation you get from the deaf. Unexpectedly she says something back. Synapses firing, signal’s sent. I hadn’t anticipated this. What do I do? I tug one half of the London Symphony Orchestra out the side of my head.

“I’m sorry?”

“I got a basket in the end.”

She’s almost as bashful as I am. I want to say “Clever girl,” to this, but she might not know I’m quoting Jurassic Park. She might think that’s just me being facetious. Or she might think I’m quoting Jurassic Park and wonder what the fuck it’s got to do with baskets and crisps. So I quickly change it to -

“Clever thinking.”

- which probably still sounds patronising, but without the Spielberg.

I just wasn’t ready. I was thinking about other stuff. Thinking about high concept movies. What’s my Jaws? My Die Hard? My story so simple but effective it becomes the sales pitch for other stories. Turns out it’s derivative shit; Duel meets Assault on Precinct 13. Judgement Night with a Range Rover. No subtext or sophistication. I’m sending it to the Recycle Bin in my brain while Rose tells me she got the basket.

In not being prepared, I haven’t changed the program: Walk to the bus-stop. So as I say “Clever thinking,” my feet keep carrying me. I turn, civil enough to face her as I speak and smile. But I’m walking sideways. This crab-like jerk who can’t stop and say hello. Mister Importantpants off to his next meeting. Eventually I pirouette to stop myself walking backwards, but I don’t know how this is any less idiotic. ‘Sorry, lady. Can’t talk to you, but I will give you a twirl.’ Demented catwalk-turn over, I steer myself down a side-street to the C11 stop and eventually I’m home and I watch that Largo Winch movie and eat French cheese.

What should I have done? ‘My name’s Ed, by the way,’ works in a script because the next line is ‘Rose,’ or ‘Pleased to meet you,’ or a dozen variations. It’s not ‘So?’ or silence. It’s not ‘Let’s not get carried away. You didn’t catch me and the helicopter as we fell from the roof of the Daily Planet. You picked up my pan-fried Bacon and Cheddar.’

I could have asked her a question, it was on my mind anyway – do I buy Tiptree Orange Marmalade, because it’s the brand my Dad buys? Or do I buy Frank Cooper’s Vintage Oxford, because it’s the brand James Bond takes with his toast? It could well have resulted in awkward, goofy Rose just as unprepared. Fumbling, bungling, falling off the ground, roles reversed. Or she could have wondered what kind of idiot lets Ian Fleming choose his breakfast. Perhaps the best outcome was just ‘Nice man picked up my crisps,’ without any Sliding Doors analysis.

Quick-witted. Clearly I don’t live in the moment. I live in the past – hence the thousand words on someone dropping their shopping. Should it be something I work at overcoming? I don’t play Indie Guitar and I can’t drain a radiator, so I can’t just rely on the chicks to flock to me. I must make the most of the moment. The spontaneity and awareness so when opportunity knocks, I’m there to offer it a basket, an introduction.

“So...ummm...”

Back then long time ago, when grass was green.

2011-06-19T10:58:00.005+01:00

Well now.
London, innit. I’m back. Me old China.

Ta ra Liverpool, but this was a call I had to answer. You see, I’ve landed a rather boffo writing job, and it’ll probably do for me to be back in the sooty bosom of the city. Back on the streets, soaking up the dirt, the hardship, the struggle and then wringing it out into my new writing gig, on the most quintessentially Laandaan of telly shows.

But just because I’m going to work and walking round sets with a massive, idiotic grin on my face, doesn’t mean that I don’t still love you and miss you, Liverpool.

I remember when first we met. In the summer. I stepped off the train at Lime Street, where you greeted me with a statue of Ken Dodd. ‘What? The Beatles? Don’t be soft, kid,’ you winked, only to later hitch up your skirt and remind me about the airport, the museums, the bus tours, the plaques, the clubs, the street festival, the walks... ‘We’ve got a statue of Billy Fury down by the river.’

You might have had your hair teased up and your nails done, but that first walk past the dreaded karaoke pubs hinted that you were a dirty bird at heart. Oh, you could be very clean and pristine when you wanted, in your new Liverpool One duds – with your multiplex and hotels and avenues of shops all glass and steel, but there was always a back-alley charm to you. Bold Street, home to Resurrection and my shopgirl crushes (Josh Homme - ‘I Wanna Make it Wit Chu’ playing when I walk in. Has to be a sign, right?). Home to Tabac, all red leather and breakfast. Home to Mattas, where the shopkeeper has the best voice; a rumbling Ringo variation so deep it’s on the Richter scale, and the walls are decked in sauce and spice. Home to Oxfam, where someone kept donating Lawrence Blocks to keep my bookshelves healthy and the girl at the counter wore a hat and was too young for me. There was Leaf, late to the party. We had toast and tea together. Before my van took me back to London, I saw one of the Leaf girls in Tescos. We came to the self-service checkout at the same time. I said she could go first, I insist, but she said she got there a second after me. I should have said that I wanted her to go first so I could stay in Liverpool a minute longer. But I didn’t. I bought two chicken wraps and a 7up and left. Round the corner there was FACT, where we sat on couches and watched fillums together. And tucked behind all that was Alma de Cuba – the outlandish church/cocktail bar/carnival only you could have pulled off. There was the Zanzibar, packed with subterranean sounds, Heebie Jeebies, with its love-sofa, its squashed patrons, its inevitable fights and glass-smashing, its wagers won. The Masque, where Ten Bands Ten Minutes was a first kiss of cover-versions. There was New Year at Le Bateau. There was The Kazimier, a secret door to a Ridley Scott deco-box, all dry ice and cider.

And what of World’s Apart? My local comic book shop. They told me the issue of X-Men I’d bought looked like a porno and THIS IS NOT A LIBRARY. They treated me mean, it kept me keen.

Then, after I’d gotten to know you better, you showed your softer side, your summer dress. Lark Lane. The Moon & Pea. I could stop and join friends for a breakfast, then pop across the street for a honeycomb ice-cream to take to the park. Dear, sweet, Sefton Park. Even in rain you were pretty, but in sun you were gorgeous. I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time with you. I hoped we’d move in together – that I’d trade my town-house for something woodier, with beams and old doors. I hoped we’d go steady, but we were just a fling. Maybe it’s better that way.

In London I think they call The Asda just plain old ‘Asda’. Tesco’s ends in ‘Oh’, and I don’t think they even have a Home and Bargains. Maybe it’s ‘The Waitrose’ here. It all feels so confusing.

You might have kicked up some gale-force tantrums, shaking the windows, turning my umbrella inside out, howling away all night – but when you calmed down you had such a bright apology. For the price of a magazine and a bottle of pop, I could take the train to Crosby, Formby or Southport. Blue skies and horizons. Not some purple-grey sheet pulled over a sea of buildings. In the evenings you’d impress me with oranges and pinks and streaks of inky blue. The rain would roll in off the Mersey for twenty minutes at a time. It all ended up in Manchester anyway.

And then there were the people. The talent. You introduced me to people who have changed my life. People so rare and wonderful. Should I name and shame them? I won’t, because we’ll be here all day. They know who they are. Some were local; they had that music in their voices, that vibrancy, that innate ability to entertain. Some had found themselves there, much like I had, from all corners of the globe. Some were from The Wirral. They were writers, cartoonists, musicians, designers, teachers, actors. They were stylish, generous, witty, kind, sexy, fun. You let me shake hands with The Revenge Tragedies, Friday’s Ghost, Hillary and the Democrats, Married to the Sea, Novice Mathematic, Hot Club de Paris, Hannah Peel, Thomas J. Speight, The Bottletop Millionaires, Theresa Stern. Musicians might continually thwart my romantic ambitions, but they more than compensate for it with such excellence. I beamed from the audience.

And with a bit of a cake, a bashed piñata and some retro heckles my party was over, and I’m back in London. Like Mad Max at the end of Beyond Thunderdome I let the children fly away to Tomorrow-morrow Land in their plane (or drive to a cottage in the Lakes), while I wander towards the horizon with some spears slung across my back and one shoulder pad.

London. This is where I stop with all this twee storytelling and get my flick-knife out.

I might have said at the top that I’m back here on good terms. I couldn’t have wished for a better reason to come home, so don’t cry for me. I’ve got one of the best toy boxes on telly to play with. And maybe this time around I’ll see a different side to that harsh, aloof and trendy girl that I don’t normally get on with. We’ll meet on a train home and forget why we fell out in the first place. Second chances, pedestal girls and all that.

x

You have a winning way, so keep it. Your future. Your future.

2011-04-18T02:28:00.009+01:00

I volunteered another art/Indie credentials design thing. This time for Kowalskiy Scottish Music Blog. What can I say? I'm a sucker for the accent. 'Oot' and 'Pish' and 'Wee'. Not a bad little playlist, either.

Click on them faces if you want to see biggen.

A mix of people I know, until I got bored of photo referencing, and then made up people, until I got bored of making up faces and threw in another cameo. There's everyone from Totoro to my mum and dad enjoying some Rock Immortality. Although my dad already enjoys Rock Immortality: He used to give Chrissie Hynde a lift to work. Awesome.

Seven months.

Beale's Place.

2011-04-05T22:33:00.007+01:00

Was thinking about Ian Beale, or maybe I was really thinking about Adam Woodyatt...is there a difference?

Ian Beale. Terminally Ian Beale. Irredeemably Ian Beale. Permanently Ian Beale. He's sort of the poster boy of toadiness. He's a twat. Adam Woodyatt has played the quintessential dickhead for more than 2,000 episodes; the longest serving cast member on EastEnders. He's been Ian Beale since 1985. He's been playing that smug stain for as long as Wayne Rooney, Keira Knightly, Nicola Roberts have walked the earth.

I've seen Adam Woodyatt at the Soap Awards. He stepped up to the mic as the face of EastEnders, which he deserves; he's put in the hours. But in my head, I can't help but go 'Oh, piss off Ian.' Sure. Babs Windsor, everyone loves Babs Windsor. But when Steve McFadden takes the mic, I don't go 'Oh, piss off Phil Mitchell'. Phil Mitchell's a crack addict, and an armed robber, and a bastard, and he slept with his brother's wife, and then tried to kill him in a Vauxhall Astra. How bad do you have to be for that to be the better choice?

You have to be Ian Beale.

Ian Beale. Amazingly he's been married four times. Un-amazingly they've all ended. Cindy even paid a man to shoot him to death. That's what Ian Beale does to you. According to Wikipedia, 64% of all people with television sets tuned in to see Ian Beale get shot. Ian's such a loser that he survived. He could have died, a tragic exit, everyone feeling sorry for him. But he survived, and everyone went back to thinking he was a fart with skin and hair. Still, he went on to marry Tamzin Outwaite. Then she dumped him after she found out he'd lied about his kid having cancer. I think this happened at the reception. Of the wedding. Then there was Laura. Ian's nanny. She died falling downstairs going to answer the door - IAN BEALE KILLED HIS WIFE WITH A DOORBELL.

Most recently, it's been long-suffering Jane. Ian didn't sleep with any prostitutes this time, I don't think. He did manage to cheat on her with Makepeace. He also complained loads about a women's health clinic being built where his favourite car wash used to be. That was worse for Jane. It was the epiphany moment. 'I could cope with him cheating if he wasn't such a massive twat.' Jane hasn't died, or tried to kill him, or anything. She just realised she doesn't love him. And told him as much.

By Ian Beale standards, this is a win.

You know all about Harry H. Corbett. Trapped forever as Harold Steptoe. Nowadays we have the documentaries, the films about his life. We know all about the tragedy of his genius. Well, he played a funny rag and bone man for about twelve years. Fifty-Seven episodes. Adam Woodyatt has played a dog poo for more than TWO-THOUSAND episodes. What's the poor man supposed to do? He's got to have that shitty, thinning fringe for as long as it takes. For forever. There is no Adam Woodyatt anymore. I wonder if his chip shop pun - Beale's Plaice - reflects on a crueller joke. This is Beale's place. He isn't going anywhere.

But maybe Adam's happy. The thing is, Ian's one of the most effective characters on British TV today. I'm not writing a blog about Gaz Wilkinson*, am I? Ian's a fantastically rich character. He's epic in his shitness. Actors love stuff like that, don't they? He might look at Ian Beale and think 'Will Smith couldn't do what I do. Jude Law couldn't do this. I am a much better actor than Chris O'Donnell.' And he'd be right. Will Smith plays Will Smith. Adam Woodyatt IS Ian Beale.

*Will Mellor in 'Two Pints of Holy Shit is this show still going?'

I keep dreaming about tiny animals in tiny cars. For real.

2011-04-03T13:36:00.010+01:00

- Word.

- Oh hey.

- What you been up to?

- Man, I've just been writing. Just doing my writing. And, like, looking for stuff.

- Got the skills to pay the bills.

- Uh. No. Not really.

- What about the motherfuckin' drawing n' shit?

- Oh yeah. Sure. I did some. Wait. Let me just...

- Check that shit. What is it?

- It's, like, a poster I did for UNDERACHIEVERS PLEASE TRY HARDER'S 3rd BIRTHDAY NIGHT CLUB NIGHT BASH GIG THING WITH BANDS MAMMAL CLUB & MILK WHITE WHITE TEETH & SPECIAL GUEST. If you click on it, you get to see, like, versions and stuff.

- Sweet.

- Yeah. They put it on flyers and posters I think. I'm on the guestlist. Plus one.

- Oh Snap! V.I.P.

- Can't go. Y'know. Money. No one to go with.

- Probably for the best, man.

- Yeah?

- I mean, those indie bands, right? They're gonna want to be fuckin' top billing. But girls are gonna be, like, 'Wait. Is that the dude who drew that dog woman?' 'Fuck you, I saw him first.' And then they'll all be fighting n' shit and the bands will resent that big time. Music might end forever if the world finds out how much better cartoonists are than guitarists.

- Yeah?

- Totally. Man, you a hero.

- Right. I also edited some camcorder stuff I did on holiday last year.

- That. Is. The. Shit.

- Is that good?

- I'm gonna pass out, chief.

- I can't tell if you are being sarcastic.

- Ep. Ic.

- Still doesn't help. I think I might make, like, a series. Pretty straight forward. Shoot any old shit and then shout over it in a faux-Euro-accent.

- Don't spoil the magic, bro. Let me enjoy the dream. Let me surf the rainbow.

- So what's with my dreams?

- Dude?

- Y'know. The tiny animals in tiny cars. Last night is was a monkey and he drove round a Shaolin Temple in a little stone sports car.

- It's about sex.

- Okay. I should probably go get dressed and get to Tescos before it closes.

- But you're okay, right?

- Honestly?

- Forget I asked, bro.

- Smart move.

- Word.

- Cool. So, uh, bye, then.

- Peace out.

- Right. See you.

Soy un Perdedor

2011-03-13T20:08:00.008Z

Click on image for full-size version.

Did I get him? Did I nail it? Does it look like him? I'm guessing you can tell what the rest is; an ice-cream truck, a bear, a beach in California. But are you looking at Beck, or just a man?

Beck is not just a man.

Recently (or maybe ages ago, I'm lost, y'know. I'm running down that first leg of the labyrinth, hoping a kindly caterpillar will tell me which way to go. Or at least invite me in for some tea) I told a friend an anecdote about a time I saw Beck play Brixton Academy and how the night ended with Damon Albarn wanting to shake my hand. It's an anecdote I wheel out every so often, but at least in this instance I'd been asked for a story about music, so I can sort of justify that little name-drop.

Afterwards, I wondered just how recognisable I was in the story. I wonder things like this, because I analyse everything and I have all the fucking time in the world right now to think about who I am and how I got here. I write a blog, or three, so it can't be any surprise how self-involved/interested/obsessed I am, right? The version of me with his paw stuck in Damon's hand is extroverted (had been dancing on a podium), flamboyant (wearing a three-piece grey velvet suit), and popular (surrounded by friends, Damon singles me out as the geezer who had been 'Giving it large.') I'm pretty sure the person I told it to knows me as introverted (anecdote was related via Facebook), uh...I'm a bit stuck on the Flamboyant one - I know I look my best when I'm dressed for Mexican Day of the Dead. Skip ahead to - solitary. (Your author, of course, being a sort of Conan figure, wandering the wilderness with little more than a scowl and a sense of irony when it comes to describing himself.)

And before you sigh and roll your eyes at another introspective, I know it's no big deal and this is what life is like for everyone. We all grow old and change and move on, whatever. I'm just thinking; is it for better or for worse? I'm often being told 'You know, the 'Old You' wouldn't give a fuck about this,' when I'm fretting about god-knows-what. I try and remember how 'Old Me' thought about things. 'Should I wear the Nine Inch Nails hoodie today, or the Dillinger Escape Plan one?' 'Should I punch this?' There's a sort of internal illusion that you've thought the same way your whole life. I feel like I'm no different now from how I was at ten, fifteen, twenty. Of course I'm different. I know it, even if I don't feel it. I went out dressed like Bjork when I was fifteen. Nowadays, I wonder if double-denim is going to get me sneers.

Anyway, I'm not going to do any soul-searching. Or at least, I'm going to do it in the bath and not subject you to my incoherent brain-itch.

I first heard Beck as the unlikely B-Side to a Pantera tape lent to me at school. James Pugh had done me a copy of 'Vulgar Display of Power', and to fill up the next 45 minutes, stuck 'Mellow Gold' on after. I knew what I was in for with Pantera, had no idea what to expect from Beck. So after listening to Phil Anselmo burst veins in his head over War and Love and Skulls and Fists and all that, the auto-reverse clicks me over to...WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? Minutes ago I was headbanging to a song called 'Fucking Hostile' and now it's all 'The sales climb high, through the garbage pail sky, like a giant dildo crushing the sun.' This thing sounds shitty. I don't mean shitty like East 17 are shitty. It's like this guy's a busker, man. This is an album? I thought songs got production. Songs sound like 'November Rain'. Even 'Bleach' sounds like an album, not like some man who broke into your bathroom, drunk on lighter fluid.

I exaggerate. The album was unexpected, but I knew it was awesome. Pantera became the B-Side. The main event was 'Mellow Gold'.

I'm not going to say 'Mellow Gold' broke me out of metal. Horizons expand, it's natural. The albums don't force it, they're invited. I wish I'd charted it all a bit better, because I'd love to go back and see what my own rock family tree is like. How I go from Billy Idol to 'Walk this Way' to Faith No More. It'd be great to break down each little love affair and what it lead to. Faith No More opens me up to everything from Nine Inch Nails to Ennio Morricone. I guess I go from Led Zeppelin to Tool. Black Sabbath to Mastodon. The Beastie Boys to, well...Jesus, it's huge. Chuck Berry to Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to Clutch, to The Black Keys. Smashing Pumpkins, The Lemonheads, The Pixies, Nirvana, Weezer, Green Day... You live and love these bands, you marry them for a bit, but then you start seeing other people, and you stay friends, and it's weird because you have their consent. Veruca Salt wave you off 'You know how much you love us? Well you should go check out Redd Kross too.'

Now I'm in that nostalgia territory. About how at 16 you immersed yourselves in an album. Played it over and over for months. And now, grown up, you buy a few albums in one go. Give them a listen. They go on the shuffle. You know they are good but it just stops changing your life. A generalisation - I know. Some people can sustain that child-like wonder with music. Some albums genuinely do still astonish. But both are rarer and rarer in my day-to-day.

Anyway, along with 'Mellow Gold' I discovered 'Ill Communication' (and the arguably superior 'Check Your Head') and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's 'Orange'(a tape I played to death. Man, I so wanted to be Jon Spencer). And I spent a few summers enjoying playful, dirty, lo fi fun before the coming of the great 'Odelay'.

'Odelay' - every track was just wonderful. The first listen just a giddy joyful anticipation - what is the next track going to be like? Pantera, bless 'em, are going to deliver crushing riff after crushing riff and that's it. Listening to them it's just a case of 'Will this be good, or will this suck?' On Odelay, it was 'What will this be like? Where will this go?' It was great. I thought it was the best record ever made. Beck was playing pass-the-parcel with me, and the wrapping paper and every layer were ace. Ace. ACE.

I followed Beck round festivals the next couple of years as well as the Brixton gig. But, weirdly, when 'Mutations' came out, I didn't buy it. I imagine I'd found new sweethearts by then. 'OK Computer', 'Fat of the Land', 'Mezzanine' had all wooed me. 'Midnight Vultures' was good enough, I suppose. It took 'Sea Change' to really bring me back to Beck, and - unsurprisingly, for a miserable old dog like me - I think it's 'Sea Change' and not 'Odelay' that stands as Mr. Hansen's best work.

So what does any of this tell you? Nothing you don't know. Music's grand isn't it? So are books and movies and food and anything else you can love. It's good people keep filling time with new music, so the further we go into the unknown, the more comfort we can take with us. The first CD I bought was 16 tracks. Now, however far along the journey I am, I have thousands and thousands and thousands of songs to go with it. I'm rich. And time is a piece of wax, fallin' on a termite, that's choking on the splinters.

"Everything you see I owe to spaghetti"

2011-03-10T23:02:00.008Z

Last few days I think my drawing has been really shoddy, but I quite like this for it's simple, retro feel. Kept it short and sweet, as you can probably tell by the sketchy lines and rough edges. Just something I could do while I caught up with the soaps on iPlayer. Good thing about those sort of shows is you can housework, or natter, or make food, or draw Sophia Loren, and still keep tabs on what's going on.

Wanted to ape the effortless styles of Darwyn Cooke or Doc Shaner with this. Of course, those guys could do this sort of thing on a napkin, just off the top of their heads. I had to use a photo, but hey, I know I'm an amateur, and those guys are gods.

Nothing else to report, if you guys are hoping for grumbles. I made a cheese sauce today, all from scratch, how 'bout that. Welsh Rarebit weekend, you say? Why are you still here, you ask?

Equals

2011-03-09T14:51:00.020Z

At the end Judi Dench, or M, or both asks 'Are we equals?'

I hope the double-meaning is intended. Because as much as the piece seems to be about women being held at a disadvantage by men at home and at work, there seems to be a point about women being, well, better people: less likely to rape, brutalise or kill.

The equality should be aspirational on both sides. Men should live up to women.

It would seem it is both fortunate and rare that in my social circles the women are the strongest, the most capable and by-and-large, the highest earning. But for all I know, they've probably accomplished all those qualities by having to work twice as hard. In which case they deserve even more respect.

And yes, the example below is an extreme one. It angers me, and as much as it upsets me to, I will look at it. I hate that it doesn't surprise me that men did this, and for such stupid and petty reasons.

I don't really have the wisdom to take this point further, or even make it coherent. I'd like it if women felt satisfied about their place in the world. I'd like it even more if men stopped being a pack of bullying shits.

For more on this story, go to:
http://www.worldpressphoto.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2102&Itemid=50&bandwidth=high

Shove Tuesday, Smash Wednesday.

2011-03-09T13:35:00.002Z

It's fucking Wednesday again.

click on image for full-size version

I don't have a decent non-stick frying pan.

The Government have sent me some sort of questionnaire to check if I still exist.

...and no disintegrations

2011-03-06T16:48:00.008Z

I spend my weekend drawing Boba Fett, and yet I still wonder why I don't have a job and nobody thinks I'm cool.

click on image for full-size version.

I miss Star Wars. Sure, Star Wars is still going. We've got cartoons and games and there's the 3D re-releases starting next year, and the live action TV series is somewhere on the fringes...there's Blu Ray and the bog-standard DVD to go back to whenever you want...there's Lego, of course. The Star Wars universe is pretty much alive, even before you start craving comics and novels and T-shirts. I guess what I mean is I miss my Star Wars.

And what do I mean by that?

Star Wars has long been part of my life. I'm not quite old enough to be the generation that saw them in the cinemas first time around, but I was there for the merchandising, and the videos and the first ITV broadcasts - I remember the ITV Christmas Promo, and the camera going in on a bauble on a tree - cut to The Millennium Falcon rushing towards the screen. Oh, how the nostalgia smushes my heart. I seemed to have the action figures, your Chief Chirpa and Nien Nunb, before I really knew who or what they were. My awareness soon caught up, and Star Wars and I struck up a friendship to rival even Lando and Lobot. (They were friends, right? I mean, he was a lobotomised half-robot man, but I bet Lando still drank blue milk with him on his birthday.)

I can remember the year I got a Y-Wing Bomber for Christmas. Probably my best present ever, although I didn't really show it, being insanely jealous of my brother's Duplo Farm because it came in a much bigger box. Let's face it; I'm a dickhead and will envy almost anything. Still, I knew that I was in possession of something awesome. The thing made laser noises and when you pushed a button it released a proton torpedo! Epic.

Eventually other toys came into play. Action Force (or GI Joe - if you must) did have a pretty spectacular armoury of helicopters and ninjas, as well as being able to bend at the knees, turn at the hips, etc. My Princess Leia in Boushh disguise might have come with a plastic hat and a spear gun, but could she curtesy? Action Force could curtesy. All my Star Wars vehicles were requisitioned to this new campaign because Action Force could fit in their seats. The Star Wars figures went back in the box, all stiff-limbed, while I played with soldiers a while.

But I was not done with Star Wars, and Star Wars was not done with me.

My dad started coming home from work with little sandwich bags that had one or two Star Wars figures in them, that he'd bought at the Tuesday market in Orpington Town Hall. The universe started expanding again. Some of these figures were just...obscure... You've got to remember what other tie-in toys were like: The choice of figures from the Batman movie was something like Batman, The Joker, Bob the Goon.

What the hell can you play with these? The Joker and Bob The Goon are up to no good, but here comes Batman in his car to shoot them with a missile. Game over. Oh, The Joker and Bob The Goon are up to no good again, but here comes Batman in his jet plane to shoot them with a missile. Even something like He-Man, where there was a pretty high roster of goodies and baddies, had nothing on Star Wars. Star Wars (and Kenner) made figures of General Madine. Figures of Droopy McCool. Figures of Zuckuss. You probably didn't know these guys were even in the movies, let alone had names. So when I started getting hold of these weirder figures, Star Wars had a renaissance. My brother and I would play out semi-scripted games (after all, these were characters that had already had the adventure of their lives and *Spoiler Alert* some of them were dead) mostly centred around Admiral Ackbar dealing with robot imposters and Bounty Hunters.

Flash Forward.

In the rich mythology and expanded Universe of my own story, Paul Canova is quite a significant hero and Action Figure, as it were. Or at least he used to be. I'm in secondary school and he's in my class. Heavy-set, seemingly slow (but not) and rocking thick, bushy curls on his head, Paul was an instant cult-figure. I can't remember how we first became friends, but I do know we were in a band together - Decadence. We shared a love of Guns n' Roses, which lasted infinitely longer than my tenure in the band. One time we were talking and we both figured out the other still had a lot of love for Muscle Men (the pink plastic wrestling figures that came in plastic trash-cans, rather than beef-cake body-builder types in canary yellow Speedos.) Paul was big into WWF, and his declaration “Doink the Clown was the beginning of the end of wrestling” became a long-running mantra for me and fellow-Canova acolyte Matthew Crosby.

I went round his house to trade Muscle Men. Paul was big into action figures. He had some Star Wars. Angels sang. We carved our name in a tree with a lightsabre.

Or we played laser-tag in his big back garden and had Macaroni and Cheese, something like that.

At around that time Super Star Wars came out on the SNES, and Dark Horse Comics began running Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy’s ‘Dark Empire’ – a story set after Return of the Jedi. I’d hang out at Paul’s house and we’d play his Nintendo and read about what Luke Skywalker did next. Paul had built a Star Wars landscape in an empty room in his parents’ house. With a yellow bedsheet and some cardboard he built a pretty good Jabba’s Palace, complete with Rancor pit. Next to it, via a white bedsheet, was a Hoth scene – rebel troopers on their Tauntauns evading the Imperial menace of approaching AT-ATs. I think there was a third scene, which my memory is hazy about. Odds are it was Endor, so no doubt Paul had put a green bed sheet to good use.

I started taking Paul to the market where my dad had bought those sandwich-bagged figures, and he started taking me on trips to boot fairs and collectors markets. I wasn’t playing with these things any more...I was just collecting. The nerd gene was trying to find its outlet. I spent a modest fortune amassing new Star Wars bits and bobs – Amanaman, a Millennium Falcon still in it’s box with the stickers still on the sticker sheet, Imperial Dignitary...these were rare things. Worth owning. Honest.

I’ve already described their fates here.

I sold my Star Wars figures just before Star Wars got big again. Just before the re-releases were announced and the prequels planned. But whatever small fortune they might have gained me had I sold at the right time I would have tossed away on impulse-buy shit. I probably would have bought a set of Stone Temple Pilots picture disks. I never know what to do with money.

But collecting and owning wasn’t all there was to it. Like I said, these figures showed just how big Star Wars was - bigger than Luke and Leia and Han and Vader. The comic books and the new novels showed there was so much more to it.

So Paul and I decided to join in.

Back then Paul was one of the best artists I knew. I don’t know what happened to that talent – perhaps squandered, but half-my-life ago I envied it. When you draw, (you at home, the reader) do you ever do that kind of back-and-forth motion as you draw a line? That sketch movement as you just pencil and perfect a curve? That used to mystify Paul. He would just commit to the line and draw it in one movement. I have a drawing by him, of a Tusken Raider, drawn on a scrap of paper in class, some fifteen years ago, that I just could not recreate today without careful planning. The dynamic pose, the fore-shortening of the arms in perspective, the accuracy of the face-mask. He just did it all in five minutes while Po Perkins or whoever was harping on about BODMAS.

Paul wanted to do a comic. I was to write it and he was going to draw it. It was going to be about Bounty Hunters, obviously. It occurs to me now that I got my first real set of writer’s notes from Paul – I had written a sequence in the Cantina bar where I’d cribbed as much detail from ‘Technical Manuals’ as I could – what drinks were served, where the tables were, who worked there – and Paul just came back to me with ‘What’s the story?’

What’s the story?

Nothing ever came of the comic. Paul and I moved on and grew up (after a fashion). He evolved into a punk and a stoner and once I hit Uni he sort of faded from existence. He was a drummer in a friend’s band for a while. I'm told a 'Paul Canova' called TalkSport the other day. I’m sure I could find out what became of him if I really wanted, but I quite like how he’s moved on into myth and I don’t really want to spoil it with anything so boring as truth.

As for me...well, I never could figure out what happened to me, that’s why I write shit like this to try and make sense of it. I still love Star Wars, very much. I will even defend the prequels – up to a point. I still want to write comics and draw comics and given half-the-chance I’d probably play with toys if I’d brought any to Liverpool. I miss being on the top bunk, my brother on the other and my dad coming home and handing us those figures. I miss the prospect of a Y-Wing for Christmas. I miss Paul and me putting together the scraps we could find – before Google – of our nerdy gold rush. Never having to worry about being a failure, or making ends meet. Never having to worry about fitting in.

Back then I was always cool enough to hang with Han Solo.

These days... At least I drew Boba Fett, eh? Boba Fett’s cool. It’s not like I went and drew Dengar.

Wednesdays with Bellucci

2011-03-03T23:07:00.007Z

Hey, guess what? If you click on the images, you can go see FULL-SIZE VERSIONS OF THEM.

Monica Bellucci as Lisa. From my collection: 'Being Away from Work has Made Me a Bit Better at Drawing, Much Worse at Everything Else'.

I don't even have anything to say about Monica Bellucci, or L'Appartement - although I'm friends with the Internet's Foremost Authority on Both, so he can probably scratch that itch for you. I just drew her because I felt like it.

Over these past few months, drawing has become a real crutch for me. The ultimate distraction. I've found myself switching off movies and going back to my pen. I forget to eat, and then when I remember, I forget I'm cooking. I start colouring in and hours later I realise the album I was listening to is over, it's gone midnight, and I need a wee real bad. I'm not really drawing for anyone other than me, though it's nice when people praise. I don't feel like I can just kick back and do nothing - so I do something; I draw. Even though these doodles are just as self-serving as a day eating Ben & Jerry's in the bath

I've just got my bank statement. My income is not good. I think if you found it in a bag at the side of the road you'd feel gypped.

"Alright, drug money! I'm going to put my kids through college!"

You'll be lucky if you can put your kids through the car wash. My days as self-styled 'Out-of-work-writer' will probably have to end. I just wrote a fair few hundred words on how I feel about this, but you already know. You all know what a snob I've been about my precious 'career'. So I've deleted it all. We're sick of my kvetching, you and me both. Don't I ever do anything else?

Starting to resent Wednesdays. New Comics Day. The passing of another week. I'm nearly six months in... New Comics are great n' all, but being around all that awesome artwork can be depressing. You seen the Drink and Draw Social Club Book? Those guys can do in twenty minutes what I can't do after some twenty years of monkey-handing my pens. AND THEY'RE FUCKING DRUNK. All these books. Look at one panel of any Marvel book, just one face and a speech bubble, and you'll see something better than I can do in a week.

Still with the kvetch. Anything else?

Liverpool was full of hipsters today. Was something afoot? Even in Tesco there were about two dozen versions of me - except with bigger spectacles and somehow even skinnier, and they all had their versions of Josephine de la Baume, or Daisy Lowe, or whatever pixie-ish thing comes in those big woolly jumpers and Mickey Mouse Pants. The versions of me (much younger too, and sometimes they have suede boots on, or red shoes) and the girls match which two pizzas they are going to get in the deal. Or they buy cheap sandwiches at the end of the day. I couldn't turn a corner without colliding with a portfolio and red lipstick Urban Outfittie. They could easily have organised themselves into some sort of Art School Republic, booting out all the tracksuits from Toxteth to Croxteth.

But they didn't.

Shit. What time is it?

Wait. What day is it?

I have scones and clotted cream and ginger beer somewhere. I'm going. Bye.

Shell-Head and Cap.

2011-02-27T14:45:00.003Z

Click on image for full-sized version.

My Two Dads. Or whatever.

2011-02-26T15:19:00.008Z

Was gonna write something.

Plug.

2011-02-24T12:47:00.005Z

Back in the earlier, idealistic youth of Black Dog vs. Ice-Cream, I tried writing a post about the West Memphis Three. It was just about the only cause I really had a fighting spirit about. I'd donated money, got the T-shirt, watched the documentaries...which isn't much by activist standards, but was a big step away from my usual cynicism and apathy about the world (in short, it's unjust, unfair and no amount of Flashmobbing and changing your Facebook Profile Picture to Lion-O is going to help it get better.)

Pictured: Me, in my T-Shirt, about to throw Injustice down some stairs.

Sadly the post ended up being half-Wikipedia page, half-foaming at the mouth rant. I struggled to keep a leash on the Black Dog and was pretty much punching and kicking the sky by the time I shut down Word and buried the post.

Anyway, my long-suffering BFF has managed a write up that avoids the hysterics I'd employ, and I thought I'd ride her coat-tails on a statement I've long wanted to make.

http://worthlesschatmonkeys.blogspot.com/2011/02/west-memphis-three.html

And if I write any more in this post, it'll just be about me and this isn't the time for it.

So, goodbye.

FREE THE WEST MEMPHIS THREE

Puppy Love

2011-02-16T17:00:00.007Z

Has anyone else been watching 'Outcasts', the BBC's earnest new sci-fi about earnest space explorers? It's a little bit Lost, a little bit Survivors, a little bit Dune, a little bit of a lot of things, but very, very earnest.

I mean, I'm glad the future of humanity still concerns itself with what's wrong and what's right, but it does sadden me that it's all they care about. Mankind will colonise planets far and wide and then just fret about the morality of everything they do, rather than, y'know, having a laugh. Characters cry at the prospect of past crimes (You mean, you ordered the deaths of these poor worker clone people? Sob. That's wrong.) and shout when someone might do something that could save their lives...but at what cost to their moral authority? I have blood on my hands. Again.

To be fair, I'm only two episodes in, and eps three and four might be about engineers Compo and Clegg trying to build a submarine out of a bath, only for Pike and Jones to mistake them for space-invaders. Don't panic.

Anyway, I'm not here to pick it apart. So far it sort of works. They manage to keep the formula answer one question/present two more questions going for now. I'm hoping the series makes better use of Amy Manson - who was fantastic in Being Human, and less of Hermione Norris (or better yet, demonstrates why people keep casting her in things.)

No. What I wanted to talk about was dogs.

You see, the first two episodes of Outcasts have used Children-in-Jeopardy storylines, and I just haven't cared. In fact, in the opening episode, I actively disliked the child at the centre of it all. A bowl-headed brat who squeaked William Blake's poetry, when he wasn't saying 'Mummy, what about the tigers?'. He was made to seem valuable: The mum tried to take him, the dad kidnapped him, the goodies went and rescued him, and yet the whole time I was thinking; why didn't they make him a dog instead?

Now, I'm not some curmudgeon who hates children and clings to that principal. I like children, a lot. My godson came to visit me last week and I absolutely love him, unconditionally. He's amazing. And I often get a bit weepy when I see dads and their boys on the bus or train, going somewhere on a Sunday, like my brother and I used to be treated to days out in St. James' park. I have no rule against children in fiction, or fiction for children. The class in School of Rock? The kids in A Series of Unfortunate Events? (Yes, the boy and the baby too. Not just Emily Browning.) Kay Harker in Box of Delights? I root for these guys. Goonies is awesome; fact of science.

It's just, for every 'Empire of the Sun' era Christian Bale, there's a hundred Picard's Children
So, if you're only going to use the child as a device, you aren't going to make a proper character of it, and you can't find anyone with any charisma to play them - why not just use a dog?

Dogs mean a hell of a lot to their owners, right? Sure, not everyone can relate to that, but then not everyone can relate to a parent's anguish. Jamie Bamber's out there on his desert planet, a tiny pocket of living things - and he doesn't want his wife to stop him seeing his German Shepherd 'Puffy'. He wants to take 'Puffy' out of the camp and forge a new frontier for himself. And 'Puffy' is going to wag his tail and jump and run, because - practically - it's easier to get a dog to do those things than get a boy to recite 'Tyger, Tyger' with anything resembling charm. Hermione Norris is desperate to find out if her pedigree Sharpei 'Regina' made it on the transport off Earth, as she's had that dog since she was fifty, and loves it with all her heart. It sounds like Earth is dead in Outcasts, so it makes more sense here for people to care desperately for their pets than it would in an episode of Eastenders (Ronnie slipping the collar off her dead Staffordshire Bull Terrier 'Fleetwood' and switching it for Kat Moon's sleeping puppy 'Jumbo'.) but the trend could start here, no?

The two memories that cut me up the most are:

1. My cat Tom had been hit by a car, and although surgeons had fixed his bones, he didn't recover very well. One morning he had a blood clot and slipped into a coma. My dad had me pump his chest to keep him breathing, while he phoned the vets. After a while, Tom stopped taking in air, so I tried to give my cat mouth to mouth - desperate, idiot boy that I was. Tom died, and my dad sent me off to school - which was the smart thing to do, as I would have fixated on it all day if I'd stayed home and avoided the miseries of Mr. Roberts' maths monastery.

2. Trying to feed my dog Max a last supper of Maltesers in the car outside the vets and the chocolate falling out of his mouth because he was so scared. I held him when the vet injected him and he died in my arms faster than I could process the unreal and irreversable scene.

Heck, I'm a bit misty-eyed now, which is more than any stage-school prog with a bowl-haircut is likely to manage for me no matter what you write for him. With a dog, you can bypass worrying if they'll time your dialogue right. You've written that scene where the goodie runs over to the tent, to see if the boy is alive or dead...oh god, please don't have killed him. He's not moving! Gently, cautiously, she places her hands on him. He stirs. HE'S ALIVE. The boy says something like 'I want my mummy.' Our heroine sobs. Earnestly. Well you can do all that with a dog, except instead of a whiny 'I want my mummy', Puffy the German Shepherd wags his tail to show he's still alive. WELL BETTER. He springs up, and leaves the tent, but then, ears down, he sees his former master, dead. Our heroine (provided she's not Hermione Norris) can convey emotion because she's an adult, and helps us out with the gravitas the scene needs. Something 99% of eleven year olds can't do. They just can't do it. They can barely get the intonation right for an advert about sweetcorn, let alone depict the mixed emotions of being rescued/losing a father. Good actor + Trained Animal = Pathos. Good actor + bowl-hair toddler = as much sympathy as you'd show Beth Ditto for breaking one of your chairs, even though she's really hurt her wrist.

I can't tie this post up in one of those glib lines that mirrors the start. But often, like child actors, unless they are good, I hate them.

"Okay, let's start with Launchpad McQuack."

2011-01-24T21:17:00.007Z

click on image for full-size version.

Seriously, click on that guy. I put about four days into it. You need to see what it's like when it's a good size

This shall/should be my last bit of fan art for a while. I've turned out a run of other people's ideas over the last few months, and - I guess - it's time to get back to me. Why I'm not doing something that could make me money, I don't know. I need to get back to writing, and if I'm not writing...well, Bryan Lee O'Malley didn't get a movie deal drawing other people's comics, did he? No. He drew his. I should maybe think about cracking on with mine.

http://monsterworkcomicbooks.blogspot.com/

So, Scott and Ramona...
Did this on Photoshop. I was wondering if I could draw them the 'Monsterwork Comic Books Way*'. I guess I can. The Monsterwork Comic Books Way just means small eyes and disproportionate, skinny limbs. Originally they were going to be sharing headphones and the middle panel was just going to be a cassette player. But then Sex Bob-Omb got in on the act. Stephen Stills barely made it, although I gave his left shoulder a cameo in Ramona's bit.

Speaking of cameos. Can you spot the Monsterwork Comic Book references? Would you know what they were even if they were in your bedroom setting fire to a scarf in a bin? Probably not.

I tried not to make Ramona thin, but I'm rubbish at the bigger picture. Sorry.

Listened to a lot of stuff while I worked on this. I wanted to take myself back to teenage bedroom feel, so cue The Breeders, Belly, Frank Black, Juliana Hatfield, The Smashing Pumpkins and Dinosaur Jr.

At New Year's I went to Le Bateau, a local indie dancefloor. They played 'Freak Scene' and I was all, like, 'Get in,' and I sang along. What I couldn't believe was that song is 22 YEARS OLD. Le Bateau could have put that on in the same way I'd dance to T-Rex at The Pony Club or Popscene when I was a teen. Songs from before I was born. It's insane to think Dinosaur Jr. might be a band these young'uns think of like I think of Led Zeppelin. Fair enough, Freak Scene came out when I was eight, but it was at the short end of a line I was tracing back from Nirvana. Now Dinosaur Jr. are genuine fossil records to...what? I dunno. I'm not down with the kids anymore. Bush, Hole, Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots all put out albums last year, but...seriously? Bush? Really? Bush?

Y'know, if I ever get another job I worry the group of people I'll be expected to fit in with are the people with gardens and prams. I'll still be hanging on to bands older than the cast of Misfits. Meanwhile all the Bright Young Things will look at me like 'He still has hair on his head, I guess.'

Course, I worry more it'll be in something with a 'head office'.

Work...not only am I missing out on a sense of purpose and accomplishment, missing out on financial reward...I've heard I'm also missing out on pigtails. Fumin'.

In Back to Future, after George McFly has laid out Biff with a punch that puts Luke and the Death Star to shame, he takes Lorraine back to the dance. And then suddenly, that Jimmy Olsen looking guy turns up and cuts in. And George just skulks off and it makes Marty's hand start to disappear. I feel like George McFly in that moment.

Dinosaur Jr. there from one of my all-time favourite videotapes when I was a teenager - Thurston Moore's 'The Year Punk Broke'. The tape's still back at my parents. What I'd do to watch that now.

Maybe I should have called this post 'Whatever Happened to the Teenage Dream' - Scott Pilgrim/T-Rex/Not wanting to grow up. This post had it all.

*Drawing Comics The Monsterwork Way:
1. Don't draw anything with girls or cars in. You can't do them.
2. Wait for people to get into it. Then stop, and start all over again several years later.
3. Only draw people face-on, at shoulder-level. They should be holding guns.
4. Try and work on anything other than the comic.

Tijuana Spaceman

2011-01-20T00:39:00.003Z

Drew this on a post-it. Then scanned it and drew over it, did some photoshop damage to it. It's not about anything. No story. Just a doodle. The bird is a photo I took in Chiswick a few years back. I was meant to get a tattoo of it for my thirtieth, but being thirty I had to spend the money on utilities. Namely tiny harpoons, smoke bombs and a shark repellent.

THAT WAS A BATMAN JOKE. Utilities. You see?

Listened to that slowed down Jurassic Park while I worked on her. Took ages doing this, when I didn't want to.

http://soundcloud.com/birdfeeder/jurassic-park-theme-1000-slower

Went into a bar and asked for work. They didn't have any. I totally ran away and didn't do it again anywhere else. I don't get why it's embarrassing, and why embarrassment is even a problem. But it is and it is.

Richie Tenenbaum is going to kill himself tomorrow.

2011-01-14T21:59:00.003Z

click on image for full-sized version.

Looks like we have a sequel. I'm not sure if I like this more or less than yesterday's. It looks like an animation cel. I don't know if I want it to look that good. I might have wanted it to look shitty. I can't tell.

Finally baked those brownies. They've got bits of Milka in them. Going to watch Superman the Movie now and eat.

I dunked my head in YouTube for a suitable video, and not only did I find a guy filming his painting of the exact same image, I also discovered this.
Fuck yeah.

Margot has made a cuckold of Raleigh. Many times over.

2011-01-14T11:54:00.003Z

click on image for full-sized version.

Continuing my trend of drawing things like I'm only eleven years old, here is a picture of Margot Tenenbaum and Raleigh St. Clair.

Don't ask me why I drew it. I just wanted to carry on drawing, so after I finished the Keiko below, I went straight on with this. I'd watched The Royal Tenenbaums again yesterday, or maybe the day before, and for some reason this shot seemed like something I should try and draw. And as you can see, I tried to draw it.

'Try and draw' or 'Try to draw.' - Is one of those an Americanisation? I used to get told off at work over something to do with 'got' and 'gotten'. 'I got into a fight.' 'I had gotten into a fight.' Is one of those wrong? Work is the reason I now only ever write 'okay' and not 'ok' or 'o.k.' It's hardwired.

Here's a nice Eurospy-looking music video from Jenny Lewis. There's a weird shot where the skinny guy runs up the stairs. It's like his feet don't need to touch anything.

Nothing to rant about today. Sort of wrapped my brain in a duvet. It's all one big same day.

Last one for now, I promise.

2011-01-13T22:17:00.002Z

click on image for full-size version.

I just felt yesterday's drawing wasn't enough. So I had another go, using the oil and palette knife tools in ArtRage to try and do something a bit more kinetic. I'm happier with this, but not content - if that makes sense. That's usually the rule with all my drawings.

Anyway. Enough of this maudlin stalling. I can't really afford to dwell on this and you don't much want to read about it.

Was going to bake Brownies tonight, but I sort of ate the chocolate I was meant to use.

The Benefits Office kindly told me I could look for 'astronaut jobs' if i wanted to. In the meantime, they've taken all script-related work off my agreement and swapped it for 'bar work'. If any of the pisshouse karaoke joints by Lime Street Station want me, I guess I have no say in it. Other than "Ooiii dad it mmmooooiiiiiii waaaaaayyyyyeeeeeee."

Keiko.

2011-01-12T22:52:00.005Z

click on image for full-sized version.

My pet rat, Keiko, passed away last night. You've met her before in some cartoons a few posts ago. She was a gift, along with her playmate 'The Baroness', for my 30th birthday back in May. The friend who gave them to me has kept rats for years, as have a few other girls I've known. I'd never really appreciated them as pets before, but when I finally got to babysit some last Christmas, I fell in love with the wee rat kingdom. They are bright, responsive, playful, funny, silly. They are good listeners and look after themselves. They can be a bit noisy, a bit stinky and Keiko happily ate her way through some essential cables behind my TV, but these are barely blemishes on their reputation here at Black Dog vs Ice-Cream.

Once I'd wrapped Keiko up in her bedding, I quickly realised I needed to to keep my mind off things for the rest of the day, so I got on with drawing her.

It's a bit of a boring picture, sadly. It was going to be something with her on a rooftop with a samurai sword but as I got on with drawing it I decided she had adventures enough with just boxes and the settee. So although it's got a Dark Knight of a sky, it's just her clambering over some Amazon boxes, checking things out. I spent nearly the whole day on this. I did a version which was all swooshy oils, my attempt to 'Ashley Wood' her as I felt the above image is just too static to reflect Keiko properly. But that didn't seem to fix it either. It's just poor planning, I guess. I doubt this will be the last time I draw her, so I'll chalk it up to practice. I don't really do 'painting' so well. I seem better suited to cartoony, graphic-y things.

I will miss her so much. And I worry how The Baroness will cope (although her first love is food. She probably relishes the excuse to comfort eat. The fat mouse.) I've not really let myself process it yet. Let sleep be the problem-solver on that one.

Anyway, when they first moved to Liverpool (having journeyed all the way from Brighton) they seemed very agitated. I would sing to them to calm them down and the best track for that turned out to be 'Michael Caine' by Madness. It's my favourite Madness song, odd given it's the one of the few tracks sung by Chas Smash and not Suggs. I always really liked the sadder Madness songs - One Better Day, Yesterday's Men, Tomorrow's Just Another Day. Even Our House seems sad, doesn't it? It's all about something that's gone.

So, to play us out, please.

Superman wants a hot dog, please.

2011-01-10T01:27:00.004Z

click on image to see full-size version.

I put my pasta in the same cupboard as all the stuff I used for mulled wine. So I've just had the most festive-tasting Macaroni Cheese ever.

Did this in a day on Photoshop. 'Superman would like a hot dog, please,' is probably more in character, but I like the childishness of happy Supes swooping down, wanting hot dogs.

Stupid really. I wanted to do something cheerful, because I'm spending most of my time fretting about benefits and finding work and money and the rest of it. But if I'd spent that time WRITING, I might feel less worried.

The problem is my confidence in my writing is a bit shot at the moment. I'm not sure I know my tradecraft anymore. The rewards for drawing are much less abstract. It's easier to tell if a drawing of a sad German Shepherd looks like a sad German Shepherd. Much harder to read something back and know if it runs the right length, if it's on the nose or too obscure. If it's better to use suspense or surprise, that sort of thing. Do we want to know there's a puma in the room with the babies, or do we wait until Commando Hardy skis through the doors to the creche? And is that the end of part? End of episode? Or is this a feature? Is this a flashback? Is this the real life? Is just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.

And if I'm going to draw things, why don't I draw something I can sell? Because I'm a massive stoopy.

Anyway. I think I read a joke on The Onion once about how a craving for Hot Dog doesn't last as long as it takes to eat a Hot Dog. I really want to be back in New York, just eating and taking photos. But instead I'm eating Christmassy Pasta and failure on toast.

Ilona and the Black Dog/Puffy.

2011-01-09T14:52:00.003Z

click image to see full-sized version.

Wasn't in a great mood so I tried sketching a girl. Used a technique I don't normally do - a sort of pencil freehand thing using Photoshop but with a 30% opacity, so I could build layers like a pencil sketch. Started off using Kelly Reilly, but I couldn't get her teeth right and threw it away. So I ended up wth this girl who is sorta based on model Ilona Kuodiene, but doesn't look anything like her. It was a quick do-or-do-not thing, not much correction or trickery (I moved her eye with a lasso. That's it.)

With the intense eye and the pout, she reminds me a bit of my old boss Cags.

click image to see full-sized version.

And the sketch used for the logo. Another free-hand thing like Ilona. None of the blobby fat lines you find on my other work. The third version of the Black Dog Banner. I've been doing this now since June 2006. What's the maths on that? Am I due a five year anniversary this summer?

I could bake a cake. I baked a cake on Friday - 'Ed Bear's Red Squares'. A hybrid peanut butter brownie thing full of food colouring. It's not that fun to eat, as it happens. Sort of like a chocolate chip Yorkshire Pudding. But I turned into some sort of housework Roger Rabbit on the strength of the flourescent red I poured into the mix and today I feel like 'Pink Elephants on Parade' Dumbo. I only just got out of bed. I can't remember where I put my teeth.

2011's Black Dog vs Ice Cream seems to have turned into half art-showcase, half confused ramble. I want hipster cred, which is why I'm on the Tumblr bandwagon now too.

http://youboy.tumblr.com/

Like every other blog on it, I will use it to post things I've 'found' or 'stolen from other blogs' in the great effort to make the internet one big homogeneous entity with a beard and a check shirt.

Unresolved#2

2011-01-06T17:30:00.008Z

Well, that worked out well. Cut from newly-promoted, go-to ideas man, dream-job-me sat there in rose-tinted 2010 to newly-demoted, get-lost ideas man, no-job-me in the gutter of 2011. My horoscope had the cheek to call it my ‘Year of Career’. I suppose I still need to be objective about the other nine months of last year, so let’s give it a whirl.

I travelled. I took my first beach holiday, as it were, always being a bit of a city-break chap in the past. Lovely, hot Mauritius, with its free beaches and stray dogs. My new Holga hipster plastic toy camera soaked up the sunshine and all I ever did was lay about and read Ian Fleming. It is heaven on earth. Later in the year I went to Dubrovnik, with about seven cameras between me and my associate. Everything looked great. Stray cats this time, not dogs.

I turned 30, and insulted just about everyone who had come from London, Brighton, Bromley by mourning the people from Liverpool who didn’t show up. I’m an ungrateful shit sometimes. Or at least that’s how I remember it. Photos show me having a great time and I doubt I’d have been that unhappy in the good company present.

As for work. Well...I managed to survive a few restructurings before finally succumbing to progress. ‘Senior Storyliner’ was a relic of the old order and the new lot had different ideas. I think my name’s on the show for a few weeks yet...I’ve already said somewhere that watching it is like looking at an ex-girlfriend’s Facebook page. I’m not sure what else to say. I’m not going to go all Mark Zuckerberg and write Hollyoaks’ has small boobs on my blog. I just have to deal with it, I guess.

However that turn of events does mess up this list a bit. My holiday to Croatia happened just as I lost my job and it cleaned me out. I didn’t have the money or the mood to go to the cinema much from September onwards, so the year will dry out. No ‘American’. No ‘Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest’. ‘No Carlos’. No ‘The Way Back’. No ‘Monsters’ No ‘Somewhere’.

Fuck. I put toast in, but left the stove on oven, rather than grill. So now I just have warm bread that smells like burgers. The pills might help with the whole crushing disappointment thing, but they don’t help the whole ‘Did I buy milk or not?’ equation.

Swallow it down.

CINEMA

Okay. So, Top Ten Tired Explanations of why I like what I saw in the Cinema, 2010.

10. Solomon Kane
Oh now this is an effective slice of vintage pulp. I love Robert E. Howard. His grim, morbid heroes, disdainful of civilisation and intolerant of evil. I love muddy sword movies, though I missed the likes of Centurion, Black Death and Valhalla Rising. Solomon Kane more than suffice. It was bloody and well designed. The baddies are well evil and there’s even a bit where Solomon PULLS HIMSELF OFF A CRUCIFIX.

Purefoy looks a lot like the fake Hugh Jackman they hire in The Prestige, doesn’t he?

9. Sherlock Holmes
Silver medal as far as adaptations of Conan Doyle go this year, but entertaining nonetheless. If there’s one thing I like more than bloody, leather-booted, swordsmen, it’s dapper gents running along London’s rooftops. Jude Law didn’t make me vomit, which is leaps and bounds for him. So the solving of the crime wasn’t up there with the best of the Strand magazine, but if you treat it as a Victorian Lethal Weapon 2 it’s hard not to enjoy it. Also the score is phenomenal. Didn’t Zimmer used to be shit?

Hactually, this might have come out in 2009, but I do not care and you can fuck off.

8. Despicable Me
Funny, I tried writing about this before. It’s another one of those instances where I like something and just can’t quantify it. It got me on a gut level. Everything about it looked sucky and I only saw it because someone invited me to go and see it. And it worked. Heck, it even moved me. Although recently I’ve welled-up over just about anything. You know that bit in The Fugitive when Harrison Ford risks capture just to help that kid get the right diagnosis and he’s pretending to be a hospital porter or something and he wheels the kid to the right surgery when Julianne Moore wanted to send him somewhere else. Man, it cut me up watching that over Christmas. I thought I had brain damage.

7. Tron Legacy
And another great score. Tron Legacy didn’t live up to my expectations, sure. But my expectations were for all humanity to agree that this is why we have eyes and to give up on war forever. It’s Disney opening a toybox they haven’t really played with in 28 years, so they go with what they know – the disc battles, the light cycles – and don’t really show us anything new (except maybe an aeroplane thing). At least they were fighting for the human race this time, rather than an intellectual property dispute. I didn’t mind CLU’s uncanny valley and thought all the sixth-form philosophy was in keeping with the original’s naive spirituality. It’s a kid’s movie and it’s eye candy. And Daft Punk have all the doo-doo-doo-doo-BOM-BA-BOM-BOM-BOM-dzzt-BOM you could ever need.

6. Gainsbourg
They took quite a risk doing this the way they did and it works. I recommend you see this, rather than let me spoil it with stream-of-consciousness claptrap. It is superb. The women! My god. And I am the one left holding the Afghan.

5. The Social Network
Talky, wasn’t it? It had no female characters, everyone turned into a device, but the presentation worked. They took the right people and they made the right noises. I rather like Fincher’s eye; the camera movements, the solid, bottle-green look. He’s not so good shooting in California sunshine as he is a burning bedroom. It felt like the film got more and more cramped and dense with words that at the end you would get squeezed out of the cinema like toothpaste. Like cave-diving in a legal thriller.

4. The Town
Sometimes I hit gold with a second hand crime novel. It’s just the right tone, length, attitude for me. I tear through it on the train to somewhere, and although not a true great, it gets pride of place for me just because it was right-place-right-time with me. Just a straight up streak of crime. The Town feels like that. It feels like I found one of those books, rather than a movie. Weirdly, I thumbed through Chuck Hogan’s ‘Prince of Thieves’ and couldn’t get into it. Affleck’s really finding his stride with these crime adaptations. The Town delivers on tight spots and last shots. Renner is fascinating, as always, to watch, and the old one from Gossip Girl really surprised me. I look forward to more. Affleck should do a trilogy of crime novels before he moves onto anything else.

3. Inception
There’s a weird backlash against Inception that I just don’t get. Probably not helped by the first wave of reviews that called it a Masterpiece. But still, I don’t get what’s not to like. Forget comparisons to James Bond – a team of operatives devise an elaborate con to trick another party into doing something, without realising - pure Mission: Impossible. Inception is a heist movie, a very stylish, well-acted, well-designed heist movie within a compelling play ground. So what if it doesn’t say anything new about existence, so what of it doesn’t really do dreams like we know them – last night I dreamed all my extended family had babies and my dad let a puma babysit them. A puma which I couldn’t take photos of. Nobody wants to see Tom Hardy ski into a room full of babies and my dad...or at least, you wouldn’t get 20th Century Fox to greenlight that.

Now I’ve said it, I really want to see Tom Hardy in Puma Ski Crèche.

Strange TV spot, isn’t it? Although I totally didn’t get that when Arthur dreams everyone wears suits, until I read it.

2. Scott Pilgrim vs The World

I’ve gone on about Bryan Lee O’Malley on here before, courting some controversy by saying he was one of the five greatest cartoonists of all time, or something. The Scott Pilgrim movie was about the journey. Knowing it was coming. Posting each little fleck of information about it on my friend’s Facebook page. I really hated that I ended up seeing it on my own, but that was down to stubbornness on my part. Also, I totally nearly missed it, holding out for the perfect viewing, only to give up, go to the cinema by myself and have the projector break on the last day it was showing in Liverpool. Luckily London held on to it a while longer so I managed to see it before my holiday.

Haven’t really said anything about the movie, have I?

1. The Road

Seeing as I think it’s the greatest novel I have ever read, I was going to either love or hate Hillcoat’s (there’s a Western name, if ever there was one) adaptation. And like The Thin Red Line, it’ll be one of those films that I can only stand to see about once or twice my entire life, despite holding it in high esteem (The Thin Red Line being one of my top five films of all time, despite my only seeing it twice in, what, twelve years?) It’s so raw and disturbing and overwhelming. And Guy Pearce is, beyond a doubt, one of the best actors working in film today. If I had to pick a fault with it, it’s the bit from the book that’s missing near the end. Also, I’m not going to add the trailer because it tries to make the film look like something it isn’t.

So there you have it.

And yes, I cheated. I took Toy Story 3 off the list. I effectively disqualified Pixar from playing this year. That’s not to say it was a natural for number one...I don’t know, I refuse to think about it. I wanted to give those other films a chance and to try and find what I felt about them. My write-up about Toy Story 3 would have just been ‘JOY’ writ large. No critical faculty comes into it. It’s an unfair bias, so I took them out of the running. Nobody cares, anyway.

TV

Very quickly.

EastEnders 11.10.10 – One of the boldest things I’ve seen a soap attempt, let alone pull off as well as this. Lindsey Coulson and Patsy Palmer are the big guns. It was so simple, such a small idea. I would have loved to have been in the room when it was pitched. It will probably lose out to Corrie’s big one-hour live when the awards come, but this was soap at its most daring.

Any Human Heart – beautifully acting and enjoyable romp through the years. Shades of Forrest Gump as our man kept finding himself in history, but which an addictively British sense of mischief, tragedy and affection. Hayley Atwell is just perfect, and the money was well spent on just about everything else.

Sherlock Season 1 – Wasn’t expecting this to be quite so enjoyable. The first episode frustrated me, the clues were sign-posted (we’d see them as words in the air, visual interpretations of Holmes’ thoughts, and then he’d turn around and explain them all again. One or the other, chaps.) and I was screaming at the telly about the blatant suspect they were all overlooking. And yet, like the really good girlfriends you meet in life, the frustrations just meant you were involved.

Misfits Season 2 – Came very close to Buffy-style ‘monster of the week’ territory, but managed to keep hold of the charm and wit that has made it a show I hate when I’ve got my writer’s hat on, but adore the rest of the time. It still surprises me with how tender it can be, and even though they didn’t really get away with the thing with the gorilla, I love them for trying.

The Silence – If I ever write anything as good as this, I might be a changed man. I might actually hold my head up all the time, no longer angered by underachievement and failure. This is what I’d aim for. And the writing wasn’t even half of why it was so good. Is it fair that this show gets number one because they cast the girl they cast? Well, it’s why I was so captivated when I watched it. I was transfixed. The show sucked me in and I couldn’t stop thinking about it while it was running and it has stayed with me a long time afterwards. Genius.

MUSIC

10. Marina and the Diamonds – The Family Jewels
Am I embarrassed by this? Maybe. I bought this on the strength of single ‘Obsessions’ but also because she’s fit. Plain and simple. And so I was a bit put off when the rest of the album turned out to be pop, with a stage-school idea of eccentricity running through it. But then I saw her live, and I was surprised by how I recognised all the songs and felt happy to hear them. So I gave the album a second chance, and well, it’s catchy and fun and inventive and playful. There isn’t a lot of that in my record collection, so Marina must be good for something. And she’s fit.

http://hypem.com/item/zm5d/Marina+the+Diamonds+-+Shampain

9. First Aid Kit – The Big Black and The Blue
This is very pretty, very delicate. I should walk across a petrified forest to this and think about everything I’ve done wrong with my life.

8. The National – High Violet
More solemn, lovelorn music. Might be a trend for the year, who can say? A bit more anger and bitterness than First Aid Kit, but then First Aid Kit are just children. The National have more years to regret, I guess.

7. The Sword – Warp Riders
Quick, metal. Find your way onto this list before it becomes too grown up. I like this silly throwback stoner metal odyssey. But it’s well silly. Feels like Clutch on a spaceship bound for the 1970s.

6. Glasser – Ring
Obvious comparison to Fever Ray out of the way, I still like this. I like lovely voices and plinky things. I like it when songs don’t turn out how you think they will. I like all this toybox music out there.

5. Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
Wow. More sad folk. Well, I have a beard and a broken heart and a hipster camera and cowboy shirts so fuck it. Bandwagon me to misery. The vocals on this album are gorgeous. I love their voice.

4. John Grant – Queen of Denmark
Witty, nostalgic, clever songwriting from John Grant. I’ve had ‘Sigourney Weaver’ in my head since I first heard it. It’s a brilliant album. I didn’t expect to like it, let alone love it. AND THIS VIDEO IS AWESOME.

3. Melissa Auf der Maur – Out of Our Minds
Two things – I discovered it near the end of the year, so it’s much more recent in my affections. And IT SOUNDS LIKE IT WAS MADE IN 1996. Which means it’s more-or-less perfect.

2. The Black Keys – Brothers
I’ve liked the Black Keys since my dad first alerted them to me on ‘Sunday Nights’. Gotta say, my dad is cool for being the first person I know to get into The Black Keys, but then, my dad is cool anyhow. Brothers is a badass record, bluesy and dirty and a bit kitsch and fun like a Midwestern diner. But also, with tracks like ‘Too Afraid to Love’ – heartfelt and haunting. I’m happy that they’ve finally found success, even if they seem to hate it. Saw them live few months back and they are both machines. They play like satan.

1. Warpaint – The Fool
I’m just angry that I don’t have the money to buy this, because it’s one record I don’t want to hear over Spotify. I want to own it. Listen to it in the dark. Live in it for a week like I’m fifteen again. But yes, on one listen I know this is my favourite album of the year. It was the music I wanted and so the girls went away and made it.

SOUNDTRACKS

I can’t tell you which I think is best. So in no order:

Sherlock Holmes – Hans Zimmer

The Social Network – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Inception – Hans Zimmer

Y’know, Inception might have it. Just because it mixes BONNNNGGGGG with boo hoo.

Tron Legacy – Daft Punk

BOOKS

I just want to talk about Scott Pilgrim really. The end. It...I hate to say this...it didn’t live up to expectations. I don’t see how it could, but you still hope, don’t you? It was awesome, please don’t get me wrong. I couldn’t do it. It’s full of funny and tender details. It’s something I’ll read again and again. But it just wasn’t as good as, say, Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness. Some of the things resolved didn’t need resolving and some of the things that needed an answer were ignored. I kinda don’t like that Gideon was the one making Scott misremember things. Edgar Wright has the better idea about making Scott face up to his faults (although I think the movie missed what was best about Envy Adams’s story.) But I guess it’s down to compromise. Scott Pilgrim 6 had to be out before the movie. And Scott Pilgrim the movie had to run a decent length and yet tell six volumes’ worth of story. Still, I’m right about Bryan Lee O’Malley being a genius. I envy him his talent, but not the job of ever trying to follow up on SP.

And that’s a wrap.

2011...well my life feels like it’s been reset four years. But I came through that once, so I guess I’ve had practice. Let’s see how long I stick with it, eh?

Unresolved#1

2011-01-05T15:23:00.003Z

This should be interesting. I had a version of this saved from ages ago that I simply quit on out of boredom. I’m not sure I’ll complete it this time, either. A lot has changed between the start of this, and what might be the finish. I wonder if you’ll spot where the new starts. It’s where the chirpy typed stuff stops and I just carve the rest on my computer with a screwdriver.

Anyway. Begin:
Okay. Dust has settled. I don't feel so bad about talking about 2009 while she's not here.
As far as the reviews go, this year holds no surprises. Nothing beyond the obvious. The films I saw were more or less the films you expected me to see. In fact, they are less. I didn't even see Let The Right One In. Was Curious Case of Benjamin Button this year? Didn't see it, either way. I didn’t find anything you didn’t find. This is all multiplex stuff and the multiplex is right on my doorstep. I can walk there faster than it takes to listen to Tony's Theme by the Pixies.

I have to make hipster references like that to try and balance out the fact I saw nothing remotely obscure in 2009.

I might do better with the music reviews. But that could well be my brand of 2010 optimism setting you up for a fall. You'll just have to keep reading. Unless, of course, you've mastered the scroll bar.

From a more intimate perspective, 2009 was pretty fucking awesome and I surprised myself loads. I was given the keys to a high concept week of stories this year and also Hollyoaks' flagship week for 2010. I was promoted. I pitched a story that became one of the strands in our Late Night specials. Romantic distractions resurfaced. I won a £20 bet about the Prodigy's setlist at Phoenix '96 (and gave £10 back because no-one should bet that much on a fact-bet. You bet that kind of money on a skill-bet. Learn.) I rescued a dog called 'Pig' or 'Bub'. I survived cranes collapsing in my street. I went to the Soap Awards and saw a real-life Madge Bishop. I was an extra in LOL, webisode 16.

http://www.lolseries.com/webisode16.htm

And I totally dressed up like Cobra Commander.

I suppose I could make a top ten of such things, but it's been a right chore just doing films and songs. Sorry, love.

So should I start? I mean, is a year enough of a drum-roll for this, the least surprising, hazily-recalled, top ten films you've already seen?

Well, I can tell you now that number one won't be any sort of surprise. So let's dispose of that, and get to the rest of the running.

1. Up!

Given that this film had managed more in ten minutes that most do in one-hundred and twenty, I think it's fair to say we have a winner. This was where I broke my 3D virginity too, interestingly enough. I'd abstained from the likes of My Bloody Valentine and Bolt to get here. I should get a medal, right? I wasn't sure it would work, perching darker lenses over my spectacles all in the name of motion sickness, and I wasn't sure I'd get all that much out of the film. Other Pixar fare can be distilled into high concept soundbites - Seven Samurai with Insects, What-if-the-monster-under-your-bed-has-a-day-job, Mr. Fantastic has a midlife crisis - even Ratatouille, probably their most oddball pitch before now is still fairly easy to simplify: Rat likes posh food. Up! on the other-hand, is sold on this flying house business, but it turns out it’s not about that. Add lost loves, prehistoric birds, childhood heroes, absent fathers, zeppelins, uncharted lands, dogfights, property disputes...it's so weird, and so bloody brilliant and heart-wrenching and years ahead of the competition. I could be frustrated that they didn't win the Best Picture Oscar for this...but then you know one day Pixar will. For something better than this. Something, currently, I can't even imagine.

Although...cranky old man gets in makeshift vehicle and careers across hilly landscape...it's Pixar's Last of the Summer Wine, right?

Let's take a moment to enjoy some other company's last-minute rush job supermarket cash-in animation. And by animation, I mean 'racist picture-twitch'.

I'd have been happier if everyone involved in 'What's Up: Balloon to the Rescue' just came round to my flat and made me check their prostates. If you bought that movie by mistake, I think your children get to drag you behind a chariot at the start of the 2012 Olympics. Please don't do what I did and keep going and watch their takes on Cars and Kung Fu Panda. I went there so you wouldn't have to.

10. Crank: High Voltage
Oh, when people realise what didn't make my top ten, when this did...
It's stupid. They made it in about five days - from writing to cinema screens, I mean. Trashy, vulgar, gratuitous. Do I need to apologise for liking this film so much? Well, yeah. I should probably take a bath too.

9. Harry Brown
Michael Caine has gone from being an actor, to something of a joke, and then back again. Probably to greater recognition than anything from his iconic 60s heyday. He’s a movie star back then (although not by design, as he looks and plays like a character actor) and now he’s something much more distinguished. And good for him, because he’s honed his skill and today the likes of Christopher Nolan are mining him for his warmth, his wisdom, his comic timing (watch The Dark Knight, perhaps the bleakest summer blockbuster ever, and see what he manages to get out of the most intense actor in the whole world. When Bruce Wayne is planning to turn himself in...he and Alfred have this little double-act moment. It’s one of the best and most easily missed details in the film.)

So, in Harry Brown, Caine brings a lot to what could have easily have been a nasty little movie. You probably couldn’t have gone ahead with it if he wasn’t the one in those slippers, combining pathos with determination. Harry Brown is pushed too far, a point that’s a little laboured even. But he’s still human and sad for it. It’s not a film without its flaws; although I’m sure there are people as relentlessly nasty as depicted here, Harry Brown sure has enough of them and there’s not much humanity amongst the monsters, so to speak. The film is brown (exactly) and dank and dark. But I was engaged. One man’s war to use the underpass; who’s to say a story needs to be more sophisticated than that?

Of course it’s endorsed by the Daily Hate.

8. Inglorious Basterds

This one might have done well simply because I expected so little from it. Tarantino’s name had become something awkward, after the Kill Bills and whatever that other thing was which I never saw and can’t really judge, but have done anyway. I can’t really tell you why. The Kill Bills aren’t bad, but they aren’t great. Jackie Brown is great, so why isn’t he making more great? Instead he’s just rinsing clichés with his sword woman, or masterminding a big in-joke about old videos – sort of an expensive take on Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.

But with Inglorious Basterds, he’s restored his reputation to a degree. He still can’t resist indulging in excess and – well, dumbness might be the right word, but when he’s not goofing, he’s classy. Really classy. There’s perhaps one other film on this list that rivals it for tension. And it’s an odd piece. Almost a collection of plays, each centred around some sort of stand-off, the stand-outs being the Farmhouse and the Bar. A much more sophisticated love-letter to Leone than the disco-versions found in Kill Bill.

7. The Wrestler

I can’t find a way to say this elegantly. Aronofsky is has a pretty heavy hand when it comes to emotion. He might shoot maths, and symmetry and Buddha’s floating in space, but he really does like to mash his hands in your insides. The Fountain, beautiful and pretentious, is still about making you cry. Requiem for a Dream wants you in agony. And The Wrestler wants to drag you through the gauntlet on your back. Mickey Rourke owns you, and you have to suffer next to him. Injury, failure, rejection, humiliation, caravans. It’s a loveable bit of ugly. You could take the same story and make a Dreamworks cartoon about it – maybe with dogs, and make her a waitress.

6. District 9

I am so bored of writing now. You fucking saw this, okay. What did you make of it? It looks amazing and it was visceral and it took risks. I could spend three paragraphs stretching those three points out but it would be a waste of your time.

5. Star Trek

I need to go and eat or have a drink.
Nero didn’t work so well as a villain, mainly because he wasn’t given the chance. But the pacing of the film was perfect, and it was never really about him, so...y’know. Whatever. Star Trek. Can’t say I loved the theme music, either. It wasn’t bad, but... I just didn’t whistle it. I couldn’t whistle it now. What’s that say about the movie? Nothing. It just says I have early on-set dementia and someone needs to shoot me.

4. Hurt Locker

I’m struggling to write even the titles, now. Dave, Dave. My mind is going. I can feel it.

3. Where the Wild Things Are

It was about an angry little boy who doesn’t want to live here anymore. Go away.

2. Funny People

I don’t normally go in for films about people. I don’t normally go in for films that don’t have some kind of fighting in the trailer or on the poster. When I do go in for the ‘people’ films, well, they’re never real people. Wes Anderson doesn’t do real people. Sophia Coppolla doesn’t do them. I’m guessing Ken Loach might, and that’s probably why I’ve never seen any of his work.

Christ. My local pizza place just texted me. Imagine my hopefulness at the chime of a new text. It says something about ‘Hooking up for a slice,’ I wonder who it is from...which of my friends is looking to hang out with me? None of them. It’s American Pizza Slice, which is a fucking fantastic take-out, but a poor substitute for real people. Real people. That’s the link.

Billy Madison is one of my all-time favourite movies. There was a time that I loved Adam Sandler, but then he became about as good at picking projects as I am at writing blogs about movies. I haven’t seen hardly anything he’s made recently. But back when I was a suburban dickhead (as opposed to the metropolitan dickhead of today) Sandler ruled and Madison was his masterpiece. So here’s this movie where he sort of plays himself, that takes a look at a worlds I’m interested in – the touring stand-up, making movies – and where it goes. Which should be okay, or maybe even good.

BUT I FUCKING LOVE IT.

It’s the best film Apatow will ever make. He won’t get to do anything like it again, either, I imagine. It’s never going to get the appreciation it deserves either. What do I like about it? It tells you people don’t change. They’re mostly dicks. Even when they get redemption handed to them on a plate, they’ll fuck it up. We’re all part of one big, sorry mess and surviving it is your best chance of anything you can call success. Don’t feel good about yourself. You’re an idiot. And yet, despite this cynicism, it’s lovely. Don’t ask me how. That’s its genius I suppose. Presenting selfish idiots in the right way – so that you don’t lose sight of all their faults – but you don’t despise them for it. It’s a really bitter film, but it’s not. The thing is, I can’t sell you on this. You probably saw it and thought it was okay, but nowhere near as good as 40-Year Old Virgin. Or you thought it sucked. I don’t imagine any of you think it’s the best film of 2009. There’s a deleted scene, even, that I think is just beautiful. All it is – Adam Sandler not wanting to shoot a scene where he eats Hot Dogs, and it’s perfect.

Janusz Kaminski photographed it and Aziz Ansari was in it.

Oh, hey, just got an email from my old school buddy Matthew and...it’s more fucking advertising. It’s his comedy stand-up stuff, which I’ve already had half-a-day of on Facebook. It’s another crushing disappointment – but it’s about ‘Real People’ and ‘Funny People’ so it ties in and it’s okay. Except it’s not and I’m fucking going mental.

FUCK AND BOLLOCKS

I forgot Moon and I forgot The Hangover because I’m an idiot and can’t read lists properly. And I’m too lazy to go and get rid of whatever’s at the top of the list because I actually wrote something for them and this is just awful now, isn’t it? I had a year to plan this post and it reads like I drank some paint I found in a park behind the hospital.

Worst Movie of the Year: The Surrogates.

I can tell you what happens in the trailer – a plastic, one armed Bruce Willis gets hit by a car. I can’t remember this bit in the film. In my defense, I got up and went for a leak, and then I just wandered around for a bit outside the screen, reading texts, looking at posters, trying to find something to keep me from going back in. When I finally returned to my seat nobody had to fill me in on what I’d missed. I hadn’t missed anything. It was still plodding along at the pace of a week on Sunset Beach, but without any of the story. I can’t remember what the ending was and I was there for that bit. People complained about The Spirit? Seriously? It was daft and pretty and Eva Mendes, Eva Mendes, Eva Mendes. Stuff happened, even if it was idiotic.

Here’s a simple challenge. Watch The Surrogates at home, and don’t at any point get up and do anything else. Don’t look at a clock. Don’t glance at the laptop for little red flags. Don’t start flicking through Guardian Weekend or whatever. Like eating a donut without licking your lips – just watch The Surrogates. And then call an ambulance.

Other bits.

I clocked up a few Romantic Comedies. Well, three. No guns on the posters. They were all sort of wannabe-Indie. ‘He’s Just Not that into You’ was okay, if uneven and a bit one-sided. ‘Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist’ showed us some of New York we don’t always see and Ari Graynor did a great turn in it as the drunk best friend, but the rest of it... http://worthlesschatmonkeys.blogspot.com/2010/07/nick-and-norahs-infinite-lack-of.html
is summed up pretty well by my friend.

The one that came closest to making this list was (500) Days of Summer. But, like Heathers, it has an ending so inexcusably shit I clench my fists just thinking about it. All the honesty that went before it gets pissed up a wall in one stroke. If (500) Days of Summer had just ended with...um...spoiler....the park bench scene and the reality that it just doesn’t work out for everyone...that would have been bold. But the contrived, bullshit wink-at-the-camera Autumn? Awful. Insulting. Besides, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s character goes on to study architecture, hook up with Leonardo DiCaprio and then starts macking on Ellen Page in the dreams within dreams. So fuck Autumn.

Nevertheless, the split-screen expectations/reality of a party is probably my scene of the year. I’m inclined to think it’s a steal from something, as it’s so simple and so true. The whole movie feels like a bit of a riff on Gondry, but that’s not a bad thing.

MUSIC

As much as things like Spotify have changed my listening habits, I think the most profound shift in my musical tastes has been because I have a bath. The bath has re-written. The landscape is new. Things are slower, considered. It could be a getting older thing, I suppose. But I don’t really listen to much Faith No More while I’m soaking in Hot Buttered Rum suds; it’s not an ideal match. Whereas I can slip some dreamy M83 on and it all goes a lot more pleasant. I don’t feel like I have to march.

Still Metal endures. Like I often say – it’s the town I grew up in. I went to Download again this year for the deliriously fun Faith No More reunion and others. There isn’t anything in the world like Slipknot commanding a festival crowd. It’s like they are the zenith of live metal acts. Something stupid like eighty thousand people all crouched down, waiting to be told to jump the fuck up. It’s euphoric. Marilyn Manson was embarrassing, fat and wasted and spent more time being mopped down for sweat than he did singing. Clutch weren’t on for long enough. They never are.

Albums of the Year

10. Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport
Gah. My rats hate this album.

9. Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavillion
Difficult, but not. There’s so much going on, but there’s still a really simple lullaby quality to it. This is a good one for the bath because it’s something to get lost in. Like hypnosis, maybe.

8. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest
Sort of my companion piece to Merriweather. Another paradox of an album. It sounds empty and full. What is it made of? Folk and a weird dreamy barbershop quality and broken instruments. Really beautiful and fragile.

7. Baroness – Blue Album
This one really grew on me. At first it seemed like the same old riff and rage, but there’s something more traditional and folksy behind it. One of those crushing bands that makes me think of Vikings. Recently I did all sorts of walking about in the ice and snow at gone midnight, and it’s total marching music. The hour or so back to my flat I got to stride about the empty dark like a Norse nomad.

6. Karen O and the Kids – Where the Wild Things Are
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were so gutsy and punky when I first saw them, and that could easily have run out of steam in the near decade since their first EP. Luckily for us, Karen O has a terrific handle on heartache and hurt.

5. Om – God is Good
More bloated prog metal for me. Trippy bass riffs, not really metal or fast. It’s as though someone slowed Tool down and tried to turn it into a prayer.

4. The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love
Just majestic. Such terrific songwriting. More concept albums, storytelling, something I’ve enjoyed since my dad first introduced me to ‘White Mansions’ back when I was a kid. ‘The Rake’s Song’ is just so evocative and catchy – despite being a horrid little tale. God, I love this album. It takes you somewhere.

3. Fever Ray – Fever Ray
This isn’t going to mean anything, but there’s a sound to this album that reminds me of going to the cinema in the 80s and watching adverts. I think there must have been a perfume advert or something that used a similar sound, that hollow bass noise, the strange whistle sound, like a bottletop being blown. It’s this memory just on the skirts of my brain, and Fever Ray clears the fog a little. The album is beautiful anyway; strange and elegant – it’s streetlights at night.

2. Phenomenal Handclap Band – Phenomenal Handclap Band
First time I did this list, PHB came in at three, but then I saw them play, twice, and you can’t beat a good live show for redefining songs. PHB are a band you simply need to see play. Maybe to the more musically educated, they are just a good gang of plagiarists; there’s clearly some homage being paid to funk of old – everything from Santana to Uniao Black. What I do know is they are made of sex.

1. Mastodon – Crack the Skye
It’s a prog metal album about Rasputin escaping his dying body. It was always going to win. This is the most ambitious metal album I’ve heard since ‘10,000 Days’. It was a revelation on first listen and it just gets better each time. Like Tool, they are happy to find the juggernaut riffs, play them a bit and then abandon them as they carry on the search for something divine. The wall of sound on this machine is immense, crunching up Russian folk notes under its boots.

EMBEDDING FORBIDDEN MOO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6WGNd8QR-U

Well, if you stuck with it til the end, well done you. Will try and get 2010 done before I die. How I approach it I don’t know. These blogs aren’t great for managing my image. But then, how much worse can it get?

Mrrrr trrrr plssss?

2010-12-22T01:44:00.004Z

Did you guess?

Green and grey and Doom. It's Doomsday, of course. Let's hear it for the big guy.
(click on the image to fly to my Flickr. Go, now. Quickly. See the blue tint and hair.)

Doomsday; killed Superman. The Mark David Chapman of comics, I guess. Famous for that one thing. He's not a great character. A big Hulk rip-off who smashed his way to infamy. I say 'character' - he's not even that, just a device.

So whay have I spent the last twelve straight hours drawing him? (Emphasis on 'him' in that sentence, rather than the 'twelve straight hours'. I find drawing supervillain hair relaxing, okay?) Well, something about him endures. Despite myself, I enjoyed the execution of it (it being The Death of Superman. A big crossover gimmick from 1992.) First, this blank-faced masked man starts smashing things. He looks impassive, one hand tied behind his back, no facial features but the staring glass lenses on his hood. Then as he got beat up and his outfit tore, you discovered he was this ridiculous-looking thing. Like an old man metaller, with some sort of calcium problem. I much preferred him when he was blank and in the mask, but I've paid lip-service to the thing inside up there. Spent bloody ages putting blue tints on him - in my head it's more like quartz sticking out of him than bone. I think it hurts to be Doomsday. Every second is agony. I seem to remember the crystal bits got bigger as the fight went on, until it looked like Superman was just punching a giant paperweight. I guess that's how he seems to be a completely different shape outside of his green pyjamas.

I think there's some sort of origin for Doomsday. I had a go at reading the Wikipedia page for him, but - so help me God - it's more boring than this blog. Who needs a fucking origin for him anyway? It's like giving Michael Myers a motive. Fuck that. Dude wakes up and smashes.

Tell you the other thing I didn't like about it. It started with Superman beating a up a bunch of giant monster men anyway. The Underworlders? Was that it? There was pages and pages of him punching out big monster men, before someother big monster man (Doomsday) shows up - entirely unconnected. It just seemed stupid.

Still, as lame as all this sounds, and as unworthy he is of bringing down the Man of Steel, he did have a most iconic entrance: panel after panel of this massive fist just punching a door. Until finally (if my memory serves me correctly) "Kraka-DOOM" and the door flies off and Doomsday emerges. And then the cutest little canary thing lands on his hand. Tweet tweet. And Doomsday crushes it, in case you hadn't guessed he was a bad guy yet.

Anyway. Doomsday was a big moo man, angry about something. Maybe Superman should have been smart and instead of just suplexing him into the sea and shit, he should have made him a mix CD with some Robyn on it. Could have cheered him right up. "It's gonna be okay."

Okay. Segueway linking Doomsday to the next one - I think I've set myself up to fail here, but anyway...
Imprisoned, breaks free, goes on murderous rampage that leads to death and resurrection of a much-loved hero.

Might have to leave it until the New Year now...

Bah!

2010-12-20T21:39:00.005Z

Looks like we have a series. At least until I lose interest. Gone over to Marvel now, which opens up a whole host of awesome villain designs. Spider-Man's rogues gallery alone trumps the entire DC bad guy box. (Clumsy sentence, but it's true). Still, I will find the some more DC heavies to pen, I'm sure. And maybe I'll find some supervillains from other neighbourhoods too.

Allow me to introduce, Doctor Doom...
(click on him for the bigger versions over on Flickr)

A scientific genius, monarch and master-strategist, Doom is also into BLACK MAGIC; the part I really like, and have tried to showcase here with my attempt at the 'Kirby-Crackle' (or 'Kirby Dots') up around his steely gauntlet.

I love Doom. I thought about essaying his awesomeness, just a little, but you fuckers just need to read him in stuff. He's Doom. I can't do him justice.

Thanks to John Buscema's 'How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way' for helping me with the basics of the body and a great Jim Cheung spread in Young Avengers #3 for the details (although I played around a bit.) Drawing these on ArtRage using chalk for the inks and colours. It gives it a slightly faded, grainy quality that makes me think of old paperbacks or animation cels. I've gone for a dull, industrial gunmetal for Doom's armour, rather than the silvery, polished look you sometimes see. In my mind Doom's armour is rough and heavy. It is not smooth to the touch.

Oh, that poster I was whining about was well received. It's good to be one's own worst critic, no?

Doctor Doom is another one of Kirby's bad-guys in a skirt, linking him to Darkseid. The segueway into my next villain is the colourscheme, and something about the name. Hmmmmm.

Doom and I listened to....

But we also dug this...

http://www.inbflat.net/

The Anti-Life Equation

2010-12-16T01:02:00.004Z

Well, this is frustrating.

I've just spent several months, on and off, working on a poster. I finished it today and it looks like the art you'd find on an ice-cream van. A mural you might find on a playground wall. The more I worked on it the more amateurish it got. The composition is awful, the colours all flat. I hate it. I've worked on it so long I just despise it. And it's meant to be a bloody gift, so I very much hope I'm wrong.

Anyway. On finishing it, I dived straight into drawing something I wanted to. Drawing for me. Sort of like the walking bit you have to do after a session on a treadmill, this was my wind down. A few hours drawing whatever I like.

And it turns out to be the best thing I've ever done.
(Click on it for bigger versions at Flickr.)

This, of course, is Darkseid. The DC Universe's ultimate bad guy. Jack Kirby's cosmic motherfucker. In his skirt, riding boots and girdle.

Now, I didn't draw it from memory. I had Jim Starlin and Mike Mignola's 'Cosmic Odyssey' and Jack Kirby's 'New Gods' on hand for references. But still, I'm chuffed. I'm actually pleased with myself. This is simple, bold, iconic. And it took a fraction of the time I spent just drawing the bloody grass in the other poster. It looked brilliant before I tried shading it. It might have even looked better. At last, a fucking triumph.

Oh, I'm on meds again. That might explain why I'm so happy with this. It might also account for the dancing in Tesco and the dubstep on my Spotify.

Darkseid, as you probably guessed, is big into prog. So we listened to this while I did his portrait.

Keiko and The Baroness

2010-12-01T14:28:00.003Z

Hey.
New comic! One that totally showcases how I don't know what my rats look like, even when they are just on the other side of the room from me and I have a million photos to reference anyway.

I think if you click on them you can go to my Flickr and embiggen them.

Enjoy.

At some point I will return to Skullcopica (http://monsterworkcomicbooks.blogspot.com/), but I don't know when. Before I die, ideally.

Going to make some milk toast. Sleep well.

Time on my hands #11

2010-10-26T20:22:00.003+01:00

I'm going to pack this whole Time on my hands business in. I'm sort of malfunctioning, and perhaps digging around in the jumble isn't the smart move. I caught myself waving at The Sarah Jane Adventures just now. And I don't want to record day after day of unemployment and mental decline.

I drew this months ago and sat on it because, well, it's shitty fan art. But seeing as it's both awful and uncool, it fits in here. This is the Mekon, sworn enemy of Dan Dare. I always wanted to work with him one day.

Time on my hands #10

2010-10-24T21:12:00.008+01:00

Going to rest up a bit here. Let you guys catch up with reading.

Seeing WarPaint last night (at the Kazimer, which is such a sweet venue), one of the things that struck me was how much freedom a good rhythm section gives the rest of a band. They had a really tight, strong bass/drum dynamic. It was clear they trusted each other, they were instinctive with each other. That kinda foundation frees the rest of the band up to go interesting places. Watching WarPaint lay down a relentless rhythm, I was reminded of Girls Against Boys.

It's not one of those 'reminds' you say when someone looks/sounds like someone else. It's more they have something of GvsB about them. I can't pin it down. It's in the rhythm, I'm sure, but not knowing the construction of music so well, I'll have to leave it flimsy. They're both kinda post-punk. They feel like night-time, not day-time.

For a while I was mad into DC/NYC rockers Girls Against Boys. First two years of Uni, Faith No More were still only recently split, Girls Against Boys delivered something dark, gnarly, sleazy. Underbelly music, but still quite glam, quite sexy. No great shakes - they did what they did; there was no revolution. But the formula (2x bass, dirty riff, distorted vocal) always worked for me.

So while you catch up on your reading. For your listening pleasure:

Uh oh. Joy Division cover...

And more from WarPaint.

As much as I hate hecklers at gigs...

That's enough to keep you going.
Here's some photos of Carlo Mollino's home, because I'm not done thinking about space and won't be for a long time.

http://www.designboom.com/snapshot/gallery.php?SNAPSHOT_ID=5&GALLERY_ID=92

Time on my hands #9

2010-10-21T23:36:00.004+01:00

For all that mumbling about slumbering a few days ago, I'm having a bit of a rubbish time with it. Yes. I love sleeping, and all I talked about then still applies, but it takes place from around 0200 to 1200 and I need to fix that. Especially because I'm still hopping into bed around midnight, and I can't very well afford 12 hours of blissful oblivion when Benny Fitz won't even cover my rent.

So I am trying out Yogi Tea's 'Bed Time', which I hope lives up to it's promise, even though it smells like sick in a school corridor.

I just wrote a bunch of stuff about 'Despicable Me', but I deleted it. It was balls. The stuff I wrote, I mean. The movie's pretty good. But me jawing on about Pixar and all this other shit was just wads and wads of boring.

Anyway, at the end of the movie, they do something with the credits that's really simple, but was an ace little showcase for 3D. Particularly with the people in the front rows already getting up and leaving. I liked that. 3D does bring out the kid in me (though, that's not hard. In fact, I'm not sure if anything's ever brought out the adult in me.) so I was all 'wow-face' at the Minions.

Blah blah blah.

Time on my hands #8

2010-10-20T23:58:00.002+01:00

I've put an old jumper in with my rats, because I'm a bit worried about the cold.

They don't seem to like it. Which is too bad because I don't like it either.

Time on my hands #7

2010-10-19T22:55:00.004+01:00

I am so very fond of sleep.

Now it's winter, now I have time on my on my hands, I'm pretty much Han Solo at the end of Empire Strikes Back.

Except I'm comfortable. I'm content. The temperature is optimised. My posture perfect. I'm not fully aware. The world is distorted to the right degree. Wrapped in my covers, submerged in my pillow, I feel an affection. It's almost like being hugged.

Usually I'm stopped from over-indulging, either by the pressures of office hours or something I like to call the 'daylight headache'. However, winter means the daylight headache is no longer a concern. As for office hours...Well, I should have the discipline to inflict that on myself.

But I don't.

Heaven forbid I should ever go into shock. The stock situation from many a medical drama; the loved one or doctor cries 'Stay with me. Stay with me.' Well, it's a safe bet I will welcome whatever nap I can take.

Time on my hands #6

2010-10-19T00:09:00.005+01:00

I have very little to say, today. No real reason. Just it's late, and there isn't much about today worth commenting on. I took a conference call. I wrote. I researched.

And I thought about the fight at the end of A View to a Kill.

I've gone on about it on this blog before. I heart it. It's absurd and awesome. I can't get enough of it. One day I will rip it off so bad. Even if I only ever get to write for Casualty, one day, on Saturday night, in the not too distant future, there will be bridge + airship + axe-fight.

To recap. Billionaire French Industrialist Christopher Walken has attracted the attention of Her Majesty's Government because he wins horse races with microchips. He's also half Nazi experiment, half KGB agent, and plans to monopolise the home computer industry by exploding the San Andreas fault, and tipping Sillicon Valley into the sea.

Sir Roger Moore is dispatched to stop him, and steal a fire engine and team up with Tanya Roberts, who is an expert on earthquakes. They discover Walken's earthquake bomb, and it's thwarted when Grace Jones (who used to love Christopher Walken and kill people for him, before he tried to drown her in an abandoned mine) blows herself up instead.

Enraged that his plan has gone south, Walken kidnaps Tanya Roberts with his Zeppelin. Sir Roger Moore jumps onto a balloon string, and is dragged across San Francisco before Walken's blimp crashes into The Golden Gate Bridge.

At which point Christopher Walken jumps out of his airship armed only with an axe, and possibly my favourite fight ever begins.

I love it. I love the wailing guitars over John Barry's "The music for this bit will go bom bom bom bom bom bom." I love the cut to the real stuntmen, on the real bridge, rocking back and forth. I love the punch sounds. The 'Oofs' and most of all I love Walken laughing, as I'm sure you would if you were sliding off a pipe in a studio while you batted hopelessly at Sir Roger Moore's loafers.

After Walken has fallen into the Bay, his Nazi uncle tries to kill Sir Roger Moore with a stick of dynamite, but the airship blows up instead and then there is some kissing and Duran Duran.

It's amazing.

Time on my hands #5

2010-10-18T01:01:00.001+01:00

Time on my hands #4

2010-10-16T17:43:00.002+01:00

I don't like London.

I feel by saying that I do my friends there a real disservice. There was a time I never wanted to leave London. When it came time for me to choose my university, I made sure I stayed close to the heart of it. All my choices were within the M25. All I really knew of life not-London was Swindon. It seemed a nightmare prospect to end up there. For all I knew the rest of the UK was Swindon, with different accents.

Strange thing was I'd messed up with my friends back home; there really wasn't anything keeping me there. I could have gone off to the coast and started over. Maybe I didn't have the courage. In the end I went to a place in Putney, but I went there feeling like I couldn't trust anyone. There was no point making friends, they make you vulnerable. Weak.

After university I crawled over to Brixton and lived in a box. By now all of the fascination I had with London as a teen was exhausted. Soho record shops and leafy Greenwich were no longer oasiseses. London became emblematic of my failures and it stayed that way. It is that way.

London is where I have to work in credit control to survive. Where I have to work in a shop.

So naturally I love Liverpool because I came here on a high. Liverpool is where I lived when I was a writer. Liverpool is where I ended up when I tried to get out of London. It's a trophy to that. I wanted to get out of London so much. To go back is failure, as far as I'm concerned.

There's a part of me that thinks I should love London. I am often surprised by my contempt. There's an idea of London, of Victoriana, Georgian terraces, Edwardian leisure. The rooftop chases of Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Mark Gatiss even. Mary Poppins. The other night I walked from Notting Hill gate to the Edgeware Road. It's a nice part of town. Flats that fit that bastardised sense of the past I crave so badly; equal parts Ipcress File and Poirot. Fine dining and Lebanese street food all within easy reach. There's a Waitrose...

But it was sinister too. Prohibitively expensive. Not just exclusive, protected. There's no in-road to the modest earner. Maybe I would come back to London if I won the Euromillions, but even then...

As for the rest of it? Over-crowded. Constant competition for finite resources; space, jobs, homes, importance. A swamp of people. I don't have the self-esteem for it. Walking along the platform at London Bridge, surrounded by office blocks, all that space that needs filling, and all the people that file out of it and get farmed back to the suburbs. In London it's always push. Push past me, push past you. Maybe you can romanticise that, as something edgy, street, dangerous, whatever cliche you might want to roll out to make it sound like some slum in Rio.

Why is this on my mind? Well, I have time on my hands, don't I? There's a chance I have to go back to London a failure. I dread it.

Not just that. Tonight I'm meant to be going to a party. I haven't really gone out since I parted ways with the show. I haven't seen the left-behinds in over a month. I'm not looking forward to telling people how it's going. Honesty? Or bravado? And, in the way I always do, I've inflated it all into an epoch, an epic epoch.

See, I hate London, but like I said, I have friends there. I have a life there. I dine out there. I mix well. I go on dates. I hear more/see more of some of my friends from back home than I do the people ten minutes from where I am now.

And I love Liverpool, I love the feel of it. I love the layout, the atmosphere, the speed and sound of it. I love the sky of it. Being west and by the sea of it.

But I don't fit in like I do back home.

Two years in and I'm not card-carrying in crowd. It's often attributed to me that I want what I can't have. That rejection = attraction. I don't really agree with this. I think I just like what I like. That said, I want in here, and I'm not. And I love Liverpool. I am in, in London, and I hate London. I don't much like the idea of my motivations being so superficial, but I'll air them anway. At least I'm thinking about it.

So this party. If I stand around awkwardly again, will it be emblematic of my Liverpool experience as a whole? Will I use it as the shorthand for where I am now? I want to stay, I want to have a place, but there just isn't one for me...? We'll see.

Man. Aren't you just loving that I'm back on the introspective bullshit I tried to keep wrapped up all this time? It's like Pigkiller says:

"No matter where you go. There you are."

Yes.

I'd also like to add something my good friend Tom said about London:

"It might be big and shit, but it's my big and shit."

Time on my hands. #3

2010-10-15T23:29:00.006+01:00

Nearly didn't get round to posting today. I'm on edge. I need to crack on and break in. Fast. Time and money are running out.

So I have spent today researching and writing and as a consequence there's little of note to share with you. But I will stick to my discipline. I will share something.

One of the few advantages to this free time is that I can get to the comic store when the comics come in. On Thursday I purchased three titles, by, and this is unfounded, the three most high-profile writers in comics today (excluding Alan Moore) - Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and Brian Michael Bendis.

For the uninitiated I will try and distill their styles.

Brian Michael Bendis writes comics like they were for TV.
Mark Millar writes comics like they are a practice run for movies.
Grant Morrison writes fucking awesome comics.

I sound flippant, but I don't mean to be. I like all these guys. I wouldn't buy them if I didn't. I'm trying to be quick because I'm assuming anyone who doesn't already know about these things won't care for more than a few lines on this. And I'm going nowhere. There's no conclusion.

Anway, when I get my comics, I arrange them into the order I want to read them. Anything that's mid-way through a story gets a low priority, ranked by interest in the title/author. Anything that's a first issue takes a higher priority. Last issues rank higher than this. And then The Punisher or Batman headlines the mainstage. They get read last.

So yesterday I read Bendis' 'New Avengers' first. Then Mark Millar's new book 'Superior.' And then Grant Morrison's latest issue of 'The Return of Bruce Wayne.'

And I enjoyed the Bendis' one the most. It's in the middle of the story. There was no Batman in it. But it did have Dr. Strange in it, fighting a bunch of ninjas, and at the end Wolverine got Iron Fist's powers. And Bendis' Whedonesque dialogue kinda wrapped it all up in fun.

Sure the other comics had fun stuff too. The Return of Bruce Wayne had some gorgeous art (Ryan Sook - or at least the pages he finished are his), and was about Batman 'Quantum Leaping' into a Chandleresque PI set-up. But the story is now so wrapped up in a mystery spanning several titles and a few years' worth of set-up, it's not something you can really relish on its own. It's part of a tapestry and we're still not at a point we can stand back from it and go 'Ah yes.'

Superior comes hot on the heels of Nemesis and Kick Ass as one of Millar's movie pitches, storyboarded. It's 'Big' meets 'Superman' from the looks of things. He says he was aiming for a Spielberg early 80s vibe to this. Early days. Millar wrote some of my favourite comics ever; silly excessive, widescreen action. He's a master of the pushed-too-far and the all-is-lost-but-wait templates. He wrote comics like I played with toys. So I stick with him. Plus, it has this guy in it:

And that's boss.

That's all I can think to say. I read the comics in the wrong order, but they were all good. Like I said, not much else is happening other than cold, desperate fear.

I ate Marmite Spaghetti, like Nigella showed me. It's very salty. But I'd eat it again.

Anyone else notice Red Heat's been on every week for almost two years now? Cocainum.

Time on my hands #2

2010-10-14T20:45:00.004+01:00

My friend just sent me a text that I found strangely heartening.
"You and Nigella would get on really well, I think."

Normally I think about Nigella like a teenage boy would his best friend's fit mother. It's a harmless, bouncy relish for the old bird, all brown eyes and boob.

But after that text I thought about just going to the shops with her. And that was quite nice. She's a little bit merry; it's clear from her show she likes a drop or two. But as I push my trolley about Waitrose, we do indeed get on, picking out curious condiments, having to ask permission before we indulge in artisan chocolates, fancy breads, obscure cheeses. Planning what to eat when, and who to invite. I wouldn't really like her choice of houseguest, I don't think. She had this girl over the other day...

Quite confident, isn't she? I mean, to go in there and tell those grown-ups what she wants to do. Especially when it seems she's got a runny nose. Talks quite fast too...oh, do keep up. Media, darling.

Although maybe I would find that entertaining. Just the car crash of it all. The compromise would, of course, be my friends in all their argumentative, autistic merriment coming round just as often. Or maybe they should all come round on the same night. Actually, I think I'd insist on that. Just to sit a coked-up Chelsea child opposite a robot with Asperger's and watch what happens.

But at the end of that exhausting night, I think there'll be two reasonably entertained dishwashers. And then Nigella can slip on that black silk dressing gown thing, and this post ends here.

Time on my hands #1

2010-10-13T20:36:00.003+01:00

I have time on my hands. Work got taken out of my hands. My hands are free'd up.

This will be my hands fidgeting. Hopefully not my hands playing with my captain winky.

Have I spelled free'd right?

I don't work on my telly show anymore. Or, at the very least, I don't work on their telly show anymore. I suppose I am still working on a telly show I could call 'mine', it's just no one else is. But the telly show I used to work for...well I used to work for them.

I won't have a lot of time for structured blogging. That situation hasn't really changed. If I've got time to write, I should be smart and spend that writing. At the minute my benefits barely cover my rent. I need to make money. I don't even have 'chocolate or cheese' dilemmas in the Tesco. I can't have either.

Meaningfully, of course. I'm not sure I can make money soullessly. Something will stop me. Sabotage it from within my stubborn heart.

Have I spelled soullessly right?

What I'll do is this: Time on my hands. Every day until I get money. I think the other no-job project seems to be not shaving. I'd quite like to be the man from the French Connection adverts.

Hang on. I just had an email that could be good news. I don't know if saying that much jinxes it or not.

Ummm....

Swing back. Carry on. Don't look it in the eyes.

I've just been to see The Social Network. I won't review it. Maybe I can give you some quick thoughts as sort of status updates.

The Social Network is very, very talky. And good.

The Social Network has music by Trent Reznor, which is loud. Not everyone will like it. I do.

The Social Network has female actresses in it, but no real female characters.

The Social Network is brown and green and Fincher shoots those colours like they are alive.

The Social Network has Justin Timberlake in it but I think it works as shorthand.

I will click on the 'like' button for The Social Network.

The cinema was full of girls. There weren't allocated seats, and when I got there it was already quite full. I saw a place good & centre, but I had to walk over bags to get there and then ask if it was taken. It wasn't.

When I sat down the girl next to me offered me some popcorn.

Some of the time I complain that nobody gives me an opening. Maybe what I mean is I don't really know if they are there, and I don't know what to say to fill them.

I said 'Thanks' and took some. And I don't think that's bad. Thanks is fine. No-one died.

But I thought I should say something about it being 'sweet' and me being more of a 'salt' guy. And then, as I turned it over, I wasn't sure if the occassion merited anything beyond just accept-and-be-polite.

Have I spelled merited right?

The other thing was, (and this is actually my first thought, it's my first instinct whenever I go to speak to someone new) Will he/she/they understand what I've said?

There's nothing wrong with the way I speak. There are 'qualities' where it's not exactly quality: I have a slight sibilant 'S', but nothing approaching a lisp or whistle. I employ a hard 'R', the type you would find in the West Country or on Sesame Street. To me 'Girl' is pronounced 'Girrrrl' and not 'Guhl' or 'Gehwull'. If I can visualise the R in a word (worrrd) then I reinforce it. (In fact, I often wonder if I reinforce it so I know the word will be understood. So it's not part of the mashed potato that could potentially be everything else I'm saying.) There are other details that seem to be stolen parts from places I've been or people I've known. A short, northen 'A' sound turns up when I say 'bath'. I sometimes soften 'T's to 'D's when I'm speaking fast. I tend not to drop them altogether. I'm very concerned about dropping consonants.

But I do not speak Estuary English. This much pleases me. It's hardly an accent, as it lacks the music you'd find in any of the other county styles. Even brummie has notes. Estuary English is just a hideous slack sound, half-formed, chewed up. The jaw just bouncing as though words have to be pumped from a balloon clasped between the teeth.

There's evidence that I speak well, even. I've acted. I've done something akin to stand-up comedy. For two years I've gone into conferences every three weeks and made myself heard (and crucially, listened to) over a boisterous and competetive floor.

Nevertheless, it's the first on a reel of instinctive self-doubts whenever I go to speak.

The girl, it turned out, left her phone on for the whole film, sent texts and even took a call. So I wouldn't have liked her anyway. The call was from her father. In fairness, my dad could conceivably phone me while I was at the cinema. Anyone with a dad and a phone could be victim to that.

Still, I imagine it was good I left things at thanks. Rather than let the lights go up and me find out she's 14, and her find out that mumbling guy is about fifty and will work for food.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – Intriguing Possibilities

Continue? Y/N

2010-09-13T19:45:00.004+01:00

The self-service till in Tesco told me I could only buy two packets of painkillers.

Then there were two buttons. Yes and No.

I stopped my shopping and called over the assistant. I asked him what it meant.

'It's just letting you know.' He pressed Yes for me.

But Yes what? No what? It told me the situation. Was it a True or False? What basic test might I have failed had I said No? No, this isn't the case. I am free to buy as many painkillers as I want.

There was no question. 'You are reading this blog.' Yes. No. 'To read this blog you must understand English.' Yes. No. True. False. Agree. Disagree.

Yes doesn't change anything. No doesn't change anything. It let me know, like the man said. It didn't ask a damn thing. It was the authority on the matter. Wasn't it?

Do I wish to continue with my purchase? I can say Yes or No to that. Yes. I will continue. I only want this one packet of 16 Ibruprofen for now. Thank you.

But it didn't ask that. It didn't ask anything.

People often write me this: I hope you are okay?

I don't know. Do you hope I am okay? Am I okay? You hope I am okay. I'm not sure if you are asking me something or making a statement. What do I say to this?

People are confusing. And now they want their machines to play along.

Dress Code.

2010-06-12T18:52:00.023+01:00

I don't know how to dress.

Although a few weeks ago I was at an awards ceremony, a black tie function, and was told I looked like Michael Caine. Taking that to mean 'Michael Caine circa The Ipcress File' it was the absolute pinnacle of compliments. That proud day had come when the things I took from my wardrobe and draped on my naked self fit. They fit me and they fit what I wanted to say.

But the rest of the time I'm not so sure.

As a child it was all pretty straight forward. I wore what was picked out for me. It'd be something sporty in a very generic way. Some sort of sweater, more often Americana than anything homegrown - so there'd be some sort of baseball theme, or the football with the pads and helmets. There'd be a big number, or some meaningless combination of words like 'Pro' 'League' 'Champion' 'USA'. Marks and Spencer, or Debenhams...maybe BHS too. There were one or two items that were genuine merchandise - Wimbledon tennis gear, the old Crown Paints Liverpool kit - which, to be honest, were just as meaningless to me as something that said 'Stateside League Winners 88' on it. I did have a New York Giants sweatshirt. I remember I was fond of that. There was a baseball one too. I wore that, and my new Nike Air Jordans, on a date with Vicky Crowther.

That’s not Vicky Crowther, by the way. And in case you aren't familiar with me, I'm the one stood behind James Earl Jones.

If it wasn't sport, it was something hi-tech. A diagnostic of a sports car or jet plane. Maybe something with Batman on it from the Warner Brothers store. All these clothes had to do was identify me as a boy. They did that pretty well.

When I was old enough to start looking for an identity Grunge happened and Grunge was the easiest uniform ever. Obviously I didn't chose the scene for the clothes. I like to think grunge chose me. It spoke to me with its riffs and misery. The only other big trend in suburban Bromley was sported by the ravers. Branded jackets and record bags. YSL and Ben Sherman shirts. Everything had to look new, expensive. It had to look like it required effort.

Not Grunge.

Cue a few years of me in lumberjack shirts, striped T-shirts, black jeans with ripped knees. A big-ass German Army coat, with the names of bands painted on the back with Games Workshop acrylics: Alice in Chains. Faith No More, Guns n' Roses...and for some reason Hole. I think they were there just because knew how to do their logo. I'd been into Metal just before Grunge took off, so I had plenty of black t-shirts. The scenes kinda blended together. My Appetite for Destruction T-shirt with a chequered flannel shirt over the top. My hair was long, but not at the back - rock style - it was at the front, the type of deliberately shit look my SubPop antiheroes went to work in.

I became quite adept at finding the vintage in amongst the second hand. Hometown Orpington was a treasure trove of Charity Shops. My musical tastes started to broaden. Weezer were a bridge from the heavy to something that started to match my adolescence. Awkward, goofy, but with a sense of humour...the look evolved. I'd find weird old slogan T-shirts. Restaurant T-shirts. The type of company-logo tee that Camden market is thick with. I'd raid my dad's wardrobe for striped short-sleeved shirts. I switched from jeans to chinos and slacks. My clique took on a distinct look. My good friend Lorna has looked back at photos of us from then and said we all dressed like old men. We did. It was very deliberate. We started to take note of labels - but it was names like Farrah we wanted. I was listening to Check your Head and I had these eccentric, all-American threads to go with it. I mean, I was still a loser, but I was embracing it.

Towards the end of my teenage years I shifted again. That Preppy-look was being taken over by the high-streets. Skater fashion was making new versions of all the old stuff we loved. It was okay. My clique had become less cliquey. Some of us where embracing Hip Hop, some of us were shoe-gazey and me...well I was going a bit Rockabilly. It was really only the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, with a bit of The Reverend Horton Heat and a healthy slice of The Supersuckers. The look really should have been something skinny and New York, but the best I could do was Hawaiian Shirts, a quiffy hairdo and a beat-up Leather Jacket. It was kinda scuzzy, kinda sleazy. I liked it. I felt distinctive.

After that it becomes a bit of a blur. The Dark Ages. Halfway through my University I'd shaved all my hair off and I wore a Nine Inch Nails hoodie all the time. I didn't want to look good. I didn't really want to be out of bed. Black Dog dictated how it all came together. In the years that followed I really didn't give a shit. I was fat, my beard had gotten out of control, my hair grew back and I dyed it black and let it get messy. I dressed 'Like the Unabomber'. I was like a tramp Dave Johnson.

I'm not sure when I started to emerge from all that. There was a big upheaval in my life and by then I'm in my late twenties. There's no clique. I can be whoever I want to be...

Which leads me into this predicament. What do I look like?

I'm a big ham. I am. Big on melodrama. And I like dressing up. I went to gigs after school in fur coats and my hair in bunches. I liked going out at University in a dress. Liked facepaint at Halloween. I like that clothes can give me character.

So sometimes it's smart. I like wearing a shirt and tie. I like black V-Neck jumpers, cardigans. Lorna calls it my Mark Ronson look. David says I look like a gay civil servant from the 1950s. That's great. I'm happy with that. I look good. It seems to fit with being thirty. When it's cold, I dress like this, layered and smart. When it's wet, I grab my brolly and my greatcoat and I'm in character. It fits with my love of that Cold War era. Fleming paperbacks. John Barry. Saul Bass. The spartan apartment I live in...the pseudo sixties effect I want for my life. classic GQ, Esquire, Playboy. The jet-set bachelor. Well, ideally...

But then it gets hot. And I don't just like cocktails and Francoise Hardy. I like AC/DC and cheeseburgers. So the retro T-shirts come back. My faded jeans go on. I wear my aviators. I've got some natty cowboy shirts. It's all a bit 1970s Southern rock. It's not From Russia with Love.
But can I get away with it, at my age? I'm still wearing t-shirts I bought at 16. I wear band t-shirts still. (medium, not large). But in all fairness a lot of band tees are great designs. Is that enough? Does that let me go to work proudly declaring my love of Clutch?

And Jackets. I never know what to go for with jackets. Sometimes I'm happy in my tracksuit top. Sometimes I don't like that. I'll put on a suit jacket. Some days I get to work and feel dapper. Some days I get to work and I feel like Richard Hammond.

And then who is that. Spy-loving, Led Zep- living? Today I'm in my white cowboy shirt, and slim-fit black jeans, black corduroy . Yesterday I was in an NYPD Tee and a woolly cardigan. But then I guess yesterday I listened to Ennio Morricone. Today it's Deerhunter. I watched Pineapple Express, then I watched No Country for Old Men. I'm reading Peter Hoeg and Ultimate Spider-Man. In my front room I've got a travel poster up for the Cote D'Azure and another for Scott Pilgrim. I'm not saying I'm some wild eclectic, but what's tying all that together? Somedays I want to look like Steve McQueen. Other days I want to look like Jonny Knoxville.

See the thing is, I don't really like it when you see people dedicated to the one thing. Mods, only wearing the select few brands. I like the look: I like Penguin Originals. Harrington jackets. But the idea of only ever wearing Fred Perry, making sure your hair is fixed a certain way, listening to such a narrow spectrum of music...it seems boring. Wake up and it's the Small Faces. Again. As much as I loved my little brand of Rockabilly...when you see girls who only ever do that burlesque-look, the eyebrows painted on, the niche tattoos...it just seems odd. A fanaticism almost. I have tattoos, which will permanently brand me a certain type of person, I guess, but hopefully not just the one type of subculture. I still have the freedom to be more than one thing, I hope.

So is that a lack of definition? Have I blended into a big mess? Or is it good that I have this flexibility, and so long as a dress well I can dress however I want to? All that tribal identity some of us crave as a teen, whether we knew it at the time or not, it's not really identity. Maybe now I've found my identity. That's the bit about being an adult that's actually a victory over youth, yeah?

Maybe I should be more worried about how I act, than how I look. Not much point being a sartorially elegant drifter...although the movie poster would be good.

For someone who claims to be so down on himself all the time, I sure am one narcissistic motherfucker.

'Cute as a Chinese Baby.'

2010-06-03T22:58:00.001+01:00

Okay. So Mamet's written and directed a piece for Funny or Die. And...it's...

David Mamet's "Lost Masterpieces of Pornography" w/ Kristen Bell, Ed O'Neill & Ricky Jay from David Mamet

Art Heist #1: Frank Frazetta.

2010-05-21T16:07:00.003+01:00

Going to start putting up artwork I really like by other people on here. I spend far too long looking at really great stuff on DeviantArt not to start sharing some of it. However, I'm going to start with something a bit more obvious.

Frank Frazetta died last week aged 82. I can't do the man justice. My dad used to have a series of art books on illustrators - Arthur Rackham and a few others who did very classic, and beautiful looking fantasy art. All far too subtle for my ten-year old brain - except for the volume about Frank Frazetta. This one has massive, haggard dudes with swords fighting all manner of beasts from snakes to apes, typically to rescue a buxom, ivory-white girl with almond eyes (based on his wife Ellie) and child-bearing hips. There was blood spattered on snow, stones cleaved by the blows of axes, chains, swamps, smoke, dungeons, violence and ass. It was amazing. I stared at it for YEARS.

Now I could go ahead and print one of these, but I think you've seen them. You've seen the Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard covers. I think in the press following his death, you'll probably see a lot more of them. There's so much good stuff. Not just the paintings; his pen and ink work is great. Fine, detailed, dynamic. An amazing sense of movement. He'll forever be the benchmark of fantasy art. The airbrush crowd that came in after him...not fit to lick his furry loincloth.

Anyway, when I thought about Frank Frazetta and how balls-out macho his work was, this was the first thing that sprang to mind.

It's ridiculous, and I mean that in a good way. You want to see that movie. When you finally see The Gauntlet, well...it's not that movie. It has the bus and the girl, but it's not as in-your-face as the poster suggests. It'd have to be Clint Eastwood's Crank to live up to that image. I'm not sure who even thought to put Frazetta on the job, but it pays off. It's epic. That seems like a fitting tribute to Frazetta. Through his eyes the world looked well metal.

Jim-Bob and Polaris.

2010-04-28T23:39:00.005+01:00

After all that faffing about with the last drawings; weeks of spaghetti hair and individual blossom, I decided to try and do something in a night this time around. Minimum fussing, fiddling and fixing.

These guys are born out of a little doodle I did this lunchtime. Not sure what the story was when I drew them...I've come up with something since, but it kinda boring-ifies the doodle to burden it with that. Hopefully it just tells a tale.

Not sure what Jim-Bob's power is, but it doesn't appear to be a source of light. Not sure why the tall dude is the one called Polaris, other than Jim-Bob being an even less likely name for a skinny, mod-looking dude.

The names come from my best friend's attempts to name my pets for me. Because that's what you do when you get pets, let other people have all the fun with the titles...I did think they were great names, and when this doodle turned up Jim Bob and Polaris sprang to mind.

Click to embiggen. Bit Coca-Cola with the colours.

They look like a hipster Lilo and Stitch.
Listened to Deerhunter while I did these.

Right. Goodnight.

Uh...Keiko. Again.

2010-04-27T22:10:00.003+01:00

Had a look at Keiko at work, and the monitor wasn't as vivid and the whole thing looked very 'couluring-in' and not what I wanted.

So I had a re-think.

I figured blossom was a mistake. If anything, those colours suit the Baroness, who is white and pink. Keiko is more autumn.

So I took the simple route. I was never going to get something that looked real, so no point bothering with shading and colour. Embrace the 'drawing'-ness of it. So to speak.

Much, much happier with Keiko. It's not perfect. Still. It's now much more obviously a rip off of Barnaby Ward. (Was also trying to channel some Tara McPherson...but it seems like Barnaby's influence won out.)

Better a good-looking bit of plagiarism, than a shitty original. That's what I'm going to go with on this one. It's how I learn, right?

Didn't say before, but these were drawn to some School of Seven Bells and that massive B-Sides and Rarities Compilation from Smashing Pumpkins. I used to have the Zero EP somewhere on CD. Want to find it now just to put Pistachio Medley on my iPod.

Keiko drinks Yogi Tea.

Keiko.

2010-04-26T21:57:00.006+01:00

Went outside of my comfort zone on this one.
I'm dreadful at drawing girls. Especially girls not based on anyone I know.

Keiko is such a girl.

Well, no. She is based on someone. She's based on a rat. Keiko is soon to be a pet of mine. As his her mistress, the Baroness Saturnine. They both live in Brighton right now. They'll come up to stay in a few weeks, and get used to a new master-of-sweetcorn. Me.

So Keiko, here, is Keiko, there, as a person. A sort of Orphan/Vagrant/Ninja. The Baroness' Bodyguard and Servant. She is an accomplished thief, acrobat and swords(wo)man. When the Baroness is busy with affairs of state, Keiko is on the streets and rooftops, listening and watching. She is the spy in the alleyways.

I will have to draw The Baroness soon.

Drew Keiko on ArtRage. Taking some pointers from 'How to Draw Comics the MArvel Way.' Took lots of trial and error. I don't take to drawing in colour. I find colour very tricky to fathom and co-ordinate. Things you look at and think are pink coloured or grey...they sometimes aren't. It's all how they relate to one another. I lifted a lot of these tones off a photo of Keiko. There are 71 layers to this painting. Not all of them used. Pink skies. Grey hair. Red bows.

I'm still not happy with it. I wanted something scratchy and archaic. It's too flat. Too busy. Too felt-tip.

I far prefer her just in ink. With her spaghetti hair. She's sat side saddle, which I needed to explain when I got to the background. Hence the blossom and branches.

In fact, I might come back and do something with this again. I'm very happy with her without colour. Without background.

And here's what I started with...the rough.

She's sat in front of a window and it looked a bit too luxurious for Keiko. She's also a bit slouched and I felt it made her look like an eleven year old.

Yeah. Anyway. I've worked on this quite a bit and I'm going to stop and do something else now. Some comic, you say? Skullcopica? Crickey. Yes. I really should, shouldn't I?

Still haven't done my review of 2009, or the decade (Christ. Really?). Does anyone even want it?

Anyway. Here's the star of the show. Keiko. A-jumpin' and a-climbin'. Reckon I'm going to have my hands full.

Ta ra la. x

Light or Leafy

2010-03-21T14:43:00.005Z

Paint by numbers, if you are interested.

I've a good friend; Ellen, who was kind enough to give me an awesome Scott Pilgrim poster the other day. She's been on at me to make a cartoon out of her for ages. I seem to do a drawing of her flatmate Niki about once a month, so I figured it's time I ignored the fact she's already Ramona Flowers, and tried to do cartoon El.

Here's what happened.

1. Sketch it on telephone pad at work.

2. Rough thumbnail on Artrage.

3. Test out colours, just to make sure nothing clashes madly. Get a sense of what it'll look like finished.

4. After a fair bit of trial and error, I get the Ellen I want. Wasn't going to go with a smily face at first. Once it was coloured, I realised a serious Ellen wasn't working.

5. Nail the background pieces.

6. Gone and done some words now. Finished. Yay!

Bonus Feature:

Colouring-in Ellen!

Yeah. Bye.
x

I'm not quite a stallion.

2010-03-03T20:15:00.015Z

My best friend read my blog today. Some of it, at least. Doesn't mean anything to you guys, but to me that means the world's going to end. All she needs to do now is sit down and read Watchmen and I know the game is up. Planet is over. The things that were never going to happen have happened and the seas boil into the sky.

I think she was just killing time at work. She's finally gotten around to reading stuff I wrote some four years ago, and - hey - it made her laugh. It was pretty good.

That made me moo.
Because I suck at blogging now.

I went back and had a look, and like an ex-girlfriend's Facebook page it was just...too...painful. I shouldn't have done it.

I am in a good place. It makes my writing lousy. That's the state of the world today. There's no venom. No bile. Nothing to really get furious about. My journey to work is uneventful, sometimes it's nice. That was never the case in London. I no longer see the street-mentals of Lambeth. In Liverpool...well, it's a mad circus of people, but you really have to see them to get the joke. See their orange faces and curlers and dalmation print velour tracksuits. I'm no longer serving idiots in dead-end jobs. If there is something that winds me up at work, it's kinda confidential, it's kinda rare and really not that compelling.

So 'Yay', right? I mean, I was so fucking stressed out before. Now I have a dream job. I work with great people. My little one bedroom flat in the city centre is a nice place to come home to. Liverpool's got good music, good bars, it's all a walk away from here. People give me Scott Pilgrim posters. A bright future is within my grasp.

Could I write about what's so damn great? Probably not. Just like bad memories are often the most vivid, I just can't find a dynamic way to say what I like.

If I just blogged what I was up to, regardless, it would flit from lame, name-dropping (got bought a Rainbow Punch with XYZ, drank Bombay Badboys with 123 and you'll only know who they are if you watch T4 on a Sunday morning. (Yes. I seems to like gay drinks. Gay drinks like me.)) to something akin to the first act of Harry Brown (baked a loaf of sourdough bread. Tesco Finest Macaroni Cheese for tea.)

Oh. I seem to have made a North/South vowel switch. I now say 'bath' instead of 'bath'.

It's frustrating.
The blog thing, I mean. And this, probably my third apology for a decline in bloggery, is no help.

I don't really have the time for it, mind you. I should be writing one of three screenplays right now. I have a couple of drawing commissions to get out the way, plus the comic and other ideas. I had an idea for a novel while I was in Mauritius, that I'd like to churn out. See? I didn't even blog Mauritius. I could have. I could have told you about my feet. Being propositioned on the beach by a very beautiful prostitute and having to run away. Could have told you about the food and the culture and the moment I think I thwarted an attempted child abduction...

Didn't. Got on with other stuff I'm better at.

Hey. I even got blogged about. How cool is that?

Are we still friends after all this?

Listen. I'll give you this for now. I wanted to do the follow-up page before I posted it, but that's taking too long.

Just got delivered two classics from my wonder years. Redd Kross - Phaseshifter and The Rentals - Return of the Rentals, upgrading from worn out tapes, some fifteen years later. It's ace. Think I lost my cherry to the last one. Half term. Her sister was downstairs watching TV. Not a good memory, not really - she turned into an evil potato in the end. Good thing the album's so awesome it eclipses such a damning association. Return of the Rentals always felt romantic and hopeful for me. I'd listen to it and think that I'd meet that girl called Jennifer or Jessica on the beach with the brown ponytail I'd seen in my dreams and she'd be the one and the album would be about us. I saw The Rentals support Garbage once and met bandmember Cherielynn Westrich (I also met Robbie Williams.) I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world.

Their second album, Seven More Minutes wasn't so good. Cherielynn left the band, taking her moog with her and Matt Sharp got seriously into britpop, roping in members of Ash, Lush and Elastica to work with him. It wasn't as magic as album #one for me. He'd got that Weezer sound out his system. That Weezer sound was what I liked best. I went a-googling just now for Rentals videos and found this. Which might be Blur doing a cover, featuring Matt Sharp. Or it might be The Rentals featuring Damon Albarn.

Anyway. Return of the Rentals: Friends of P.

I kinda went off like an old man there. I remember when I lived albums and had memories that went with them. I didn't buy them from Tesco. Come sit on my knee and let me tell you about the days we played Pavement tapes in the common room and back catalogues were things you found out just by searching record racks...

Leave me in the swim.

2010-03-01T00:16:00.005Z

UPDATED 01.03.10

Been a busy week. A bit of a struggle. Blitz spirit and all that.

People think I'm moody. I guess I have two very distinct moods. I have Up, and I have Down. Ice-cream. Black Dog. It's not a manic thing. I don't flit between the two without warning or reason. I just do two gears, forwards and reverse and I mash the pedal for both. As I've said many a time, like Conan I am capable of great mirth and great woe.

Three times this week I've been called up on my bad mood. Different people each time. It troubles me.

I don't anticipate, and I certainly don't design, a bad mood to be any bother to anyone else, but it always is. My good friend David relayed to me once there was a time, round about when I started at HMV that a colleague had to be talked out of punching me in the head. I had no idea this was all going on behind my back. My manner was so objectionable, that he just wanted to thump me.

I find it all a bit strange.

The reaction doesn't ever seem to fit what I'm actually doing. Which I could describe as abstractly as 'no harm' or more practically as 'not smiling. Keeping spoken words to a minumum.' I'm not picking on anyone. Not bullying or punishing. People can go off and do what they want, same as always.

And yet they don't. There's a resentment, maybe even a fear, when I'm not smiles and cheer and japes and all that. Sometimes people react to it when it simply isn't there. I get told what my moods are by other people.

It's embarrassing. Often it knocks my confidence. Especially if it's a work thing, where being crap at compartmentalisation is a professional handicap. By my own standards I'm doing great. I did an awesome job of running things this week when I had to, and for the last four years or so I've been at the top of my game with people. But it's not always good enough. And I feel like I get in trouble with my friends and colleagues if, for whatever reason, I'm not sunshine. People really hate it.

I went into the weekend with a lot of that on my mind until someone put it to me another way...

It's true my moods affect the people around me, strongly. It brings them down when I'm down. It makes them angry when I'm angry. Call me an optimist (please...it'd be a first) but could it be they want me to be happy because it makes them happy? Are my good moods that good, that I can lift a group of people, raise them a few more degrees just by turning up and being cheerful? I have a big impact on the mood of people around me. That's a good thing, right? So long as I'm good.

Which can be done. Always.

I know when I'm good, I'm great.

I drew this from a sketch I did on Friday. Trying to work out if I am sabotaging myself subconsciously. I don't think I am. I think I value honesty and sadly that means my emotions manifest with as much subtlty as a GWAR video. I'm not happy with the sky. It feels a bit dead space. The whole thing's too dark. Subcon the Saboteur is kinda Snake Eyes by way of Dave Johnson/Cartoon Network. It's probably one of the better things I've ever drawn. Shame. Because it's nowhere near as good as anything I'd call good.

Anyway tomorrow's just another day.

Except that doesn't work because it's 01:00. It's today already. And I have toothache.

Sleep.

Hallo again.

Been and had the next day. It was weird. It seemed really stressful and crabby for a lot of people around me. But I was A-Okay. This doesn't support my theory at all. Meh.

Anyway. I've tried to fix what I don't like about the picture. Look. See.

Think that's better.

Right. Ta ra for now.

"At such time it is good to take out and apply some powdered rouge."

2010-02-21T13:18:00.004Z

Drew this while watching the Hollyoaks Omnibus. Usually draw while it's on. Find I can't write with all that talking.

Haven't got round to any kind of review of the year/review of the decade. There's work and there's play. Work mostly. I need to write in the write write sense. To be honest I don't know how valuable either review is going to be. Inarticulate 'I saw that, I saw this. They were awesome.' Meh.

Not feeling too chatty. Let's just spoon and fall asleep, yes?

ದೀಪಿಕಾ ಪಡುಕೋಣೆ

2010-02-07T15:53:00.014Z

Before Christmas there was a lengthy discussion in the office about musicals. It was mostly about the ones we expected to, or planned to, watch over the holidays - with Oliver! being the fore-runner of 'Oooh, I hope that's on' (Fiver obliged.) Some of the office refused to contribute or had nothing to say. The rest of us happily bickered about Grease and West Side Story, and whether or not Bowie and the marvelous outline of his genitals counted as a musical in the traditional sense. Dance Magic Dance.

It's good when we remind ourselves there's a world outside our four walls. Just this Friday we all downed tools to decide what films we would watch if they were projected onto the ceilings above our beds. Some people just went for the cinematic, as though the bed was just a very comfy, indulgent royal box. Some of us went for friendly favourites. Some of us treated the ceiling like a picture frame, and tried to find something beautiful, ambient, visually arresting to put in it. So we all weighed up the reasons for and against showing Blade Runner, Jungle Book and In the Mood for Love, respectively. See Team Story aren't just about looking foxy. We can handle distinct voices and competing ideas like we were the Roman Senate.

With knives and poison.

Anyway, I digress.

When we talked musicals, one of the team expressed his difficulty with Bollywood films. I could sort of see his point. I think Film 4 showed 'Dhoom 2' recently, and I watched maybe the first five minutes. A dude in ski-shades snowboarded behind a train he was harpooned to while a bad dude with a shotgun tried to kill him. And after that I switched off.

Wait...

"A dude in ski-shades snowboarded behind a train, he was harpooned to while a bad dude with a shotgun tried to kill him."

That sounds awesome enough to be a film on it's own. That was just the opener? I'd watch a trilogy, a saga, a franchise that was just that. Forget 5ast and the 5urious, or whatever the fifth installment is going to be called. I want 'Trainboarder 7: Harpoon's Glare'

But I didn't. It was as though someone had watched Mission Impossible 2 and just decided to stop there. That was the zenith. Slo-mo hair, bad eye-wear, extreme sports. Let's never make a film that doesn't contain those elements. Let's try not to inculde any others.

But is Bollywood really a genre? Surely that's like me watching the Surrogates and deciding never to watch anything made in America ever again. I'd have strong grounds to as well. Bruce Willis should have signed on for Trainboarder 2: Trackjumper like I told him to.

So I was in Mauritius last week, and in the evenings when the sun had gone down and the mosquitos were making their D-Day efforts against my ankles I watched a lot of Indian television. I watched soap operas, even the ones without subtitles, to see if there was a universal language. To see if there was something I could take back with me to Chester and it's fictional playthings.

It was here I happened upon Om Shanti Om. A 2007 Bollyowood blockbuster from director/writer Farah Khan.

Watching it without knowing any of the marketing; no trailer, no tagline, was an absolute joy. It had one of the most 'No Way' endings to a second act I've ever come across (sadly, I don't think this is a twist. I think the film is pretty much sold on this turn of events. I don't necessarily think that will damage anyone's enjoyment of the film. However for me it was totally unexpected and it absolutley worked.) The film is just joy. It's bright and colourful and funny. The design, direction, dancing - all beautiful. It would be a great choice for a film to beam above my bed. It loves it's subject matter, that much is evident from the start. It plays with films within films and stories within stories, it's self-referential and affectionately parodies some of the things I've discussed. It's also a sort of revenge movie, which scores no end of points with me, but it's never bitter. It is just happiness, poured straight onto celluloid.

Here's a really good example of what I mean. The protagonist, Om (a background artist with hopes of becoming a filmstar) , sneaks into a premier for a chance to see Shanti, the girl of his dreams and a star of 1970s Bollywood. So he watches a musical number from the film, which borrows elements from existing Bollywood movies (and yes, you can see the seams, but I think they do a damn fine job) and then imagines himself into it. Film within a film within a film.

You might also notice another reason why I like this film so much. 'And introducing Deepika Padukone as Shanti'.

I can't really review the film in a way that's any more sophisticated than I've described because I don't want to spoil the twist for anyone who manages to go into it as blindly as I have. I don't even want to include another song from it, although there is one about a guy's heart being filled with the pain of disco.

I'm sure we all can relate.

My brother is awesome.

2010-02-01T19:03:00.000Z

Click here and wait and watch.

It's possible. The point is getting away with it.

2009-11-29T01:41:00.001Z

Allow me to introduce a friend of mine.

http://ministryofrumandginger.blogspot.com/

x

To swim you have to swallow.

2009-11-23T01:11:00.012Z

Oh yes.

So this is a relaunch of sorts. It's taken me a few weekends. Sure, in a way it's taken me months/years, but who's counting? My autistic fanbase.

But a relaunch of what? I don't think we'll ever see a return to the glory days, so I don't think I'll try. That bitter, acidic voice just isn't in me anymore. I mellowed. Got tired. Gave up.

Instead, You'll get this. A scratchy, solemn, self-depcreciating/appreciating/obsessed comic book. The Autobiography of Mr. Suck, for those of you who care for obscure references to Public Enemy solo albums. (click on the picture and then use the little magnifying glass to read the wordies.)

Hoping to get a post out on the other two blogs tonight as well. But I think tomorrow will be the busiest day of my life, so I really should do some sleeps at some point.

Oh. Before I forget. The strip comes with some handy footnotes, mostly for the places and products shown.

PAGE 1.

Panel 1. Bold Street, Liverpool. Or something close to it.
Panel 2. Zorro vol. 2, by Alex Toth and 'It's Superman' by Tom DeHaven. Both in Oxfam
Panels 3, 4, 5. Breakfast in Tabac (Bold Street) and my new Sennhauser earphones, which cut out all noise from the outside world, and will probably see me hit by a car.

PAGE 2.

Panel 2. Trying on a waistcoat in Resurrection (Bold Street)
Panel 3, 5, 6. Feeding Marnie and Ace while Henry is away.

It's also worth mentioning a new addition to the blogs I link to. My foxy boss is showing her fashion senses and mittens over at 'Time for Twee', if any of you are interested in vintage wear and clever co-ordination. Which is all of you.

Noight, noight. x o x o

UPDATED: 23.11.09. Just been promoted. I'm now SENIOR Storyliner. Gaucho Grill time, I thinks. Special. x

UPDATED AGAIN: 23.11.09. I changed the words slightly. I didn't like the first go.

athene & conrad

2009-10-17T22:56:00.001+01:00

athene & conrad, originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

Two problems with using friends as the basis of a character. The first is you get protective and don't want to do the things the story dictates, don't adhere to the natural place for that character. The second is last time I put my friends in a book (a sort of Stoppit and Tidy Up style children's book called 'Ichabod gets it Wrong') I ended up falling out with half of them, and the book kinda went in the bin. That's more a jinx worry, than a storycraft one.

Sort of forgot how to draw with this one. There's no pencil version, because it was more or less a painting that I put black outlines on. The sea was an experiment, which I'm very happy with. Think the layers of dark in the bottom right-hand corner give a half-decent illusion of depth. The rest sort of fell together after that. The likeness isn't so great, and I feel Athene lacks detail. Although it serves the character to put her in functional blacks, it's not very compelling as an image. There's not as much going on as there was for Katya or Catcher (which now I've said them both in my head are too phonetically similar to work.) I haven't found a way to do detail on a girl's face without making them look old or like men. Moo.

Athene counts as a grown-up character in the Boy and Dog Universe. She's one of the few people whose name carries in the wilderness world. I'm not going to say if she's good or bad. She is feared, and she has an agenda. Conrad is one of her many owls. He's a barn owl. He's a mouser and a look out.

Athene would appear in book two, I guess. (It's a trilogy, this saga I'm not writing.) I don't want to over-populate this universe. It's supposed to be dangerous and empty.

Drew this listening to Michael Kamen's score for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Which is so ace.

katya of the blue forest, and merlin.

2009-10-11T18:05:00.001+01:00

katya of the blue forest, and merlin., originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

I reckon the weird formatting on Black Dog Vs. Ice Cream is going to cut half the detail off this one...but hey.

This is Katya. She's part of this Dog and Boy post-apocalyptic universe that has intruded on my imagination of late. (no name, as yet, for Boy, or his Dog.)

I'm not going to tell a story with Boy and Dog in it.

But for what it's worth, Katya is part of one of the last few Pony Tribes of the East. She lives in the Blue Forest, with her dad, Perun.

She has a pony, which I haven't named, because I'm not very good at naming ponies and horses. She also has a fox called Merlin, who is quite useful for finding things, but better yet at letting Katya know when danger is nearby. Katya has raised Merlin since he was very young.

It's traditional for this sort of character to be aggressive. The supporting girl in magic orphan stuff, feral and untamed. Thing is, I couldn't master drawing her scowling. I had to settle for smiling. She has a pony, after all, so I imagine she's quite happy.

She's got a gold sword. I guess she's handy with it, and she probably can fight and cover some of the bases of the strong girl stereotype, without being insufferable and angry all the time.

I didn't do any tracing on this one. Had a few photo references. Katya is undeniably modelled on a friend of mine, and I had to use photos for foxes, ponies, gold and for frost on trees. I also borrowed colour from a few sources, but I also made some stuff up. Foxes seem to be a lot more brown in truth, but it didn't translate as well so I lightened mine.

This is all done on Art Rage, which now I've learned a few tricks, lets me play with drawings in a way I can't manage in Photoshop. That said, I'll probably keep on doing Skullcopica in Photoshop, just for the precision.

I used the felt-tip pen tool for the most part, tidying up, and colouring in pencil tool free-hands. There's some chalk and paint in there, but not much. It gets all blended up. the tools are quite fun in that they pick up other colours and get mixed and streaky and you get unexpected results.

Listened to Pinkerton, "Heroes" and Strange Cousins from the West on this one.

Earlier versions are on my Flickr page.

catcher. final version.

2009-10-05T11:19:00.001+01:00

catcher. final version., originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

So this is Catcher. I'm fairly sure he used to fly a helicopter. It got shot down in the last big battle of whatever catastrophe ruined the world. That's how he lost his arm.

His real name isn't Catcher. That's just what the Boy and his Dog call him (need to get them names. Keep saying that. Will have the Boy and the Dog named soon, promise.)

Catcher has a ferret; Svarožič, that he uses to find and bait other animals for him to trap. Svarožič knows his survival depends on tricking other animals.

I absolutely am not working on a story about a Boy and a Dog in a frozen wilderness. I have too much to do to get distracted by this.

I promise that Skullcopica is my absolute priority.

After Hollyoaks, of course. Worked until 00.20 on Thursday, issuing stories. By rights I should have rested this weekend. Here I am on Sunday night, 00.35, and I'm drawing.

I was going to watch The Rocketeer and eat chocolate. Maybe I'll get a chance on Tuesday.

Skullcopica is my absolute number one, don't-get-paid-to-do-it priority. Promise.

There's a couple of other versions of this on my Flickr, if you want to take a look.

catcher. Colour Test.

2009-10-01T00:11:00.003+01:00

catcher. Colour Test., originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

Seeing what colours suit Catcher best. He's got a bit of a Doctor Doom thing going on with that green cloak.

Does he look like a baddie? The blood and machete oversells it and I probably won't keep either in the finished version. Grey skin doesn't work, either.

I think Catcher is a Russian. Or comes from what used to be Russia. He might not be a baddie. Maybe the boy and dog just think he is.

Need to get names for the boy and dog.

I haven't given up Skullcopica. It's just it's kinda work, and this is play. I didn't get in until about 21.00, and I'll be writing Hollyoaks for about ten hours tomorrow.

Bed time.

catcher. Rough.

2009-10-01T00:11:00.001+01:00

catcher. Rough., originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

I did this guy without music. I get that wrong sometimes. I come home and I have an idea and I start work on it, and I tell myself to put music on. But then I tell myself I'll do it just as soon as I've done this bit, or that bit, and I just carry on.

This is how I forget to eat, as well.

This guy is Catcher. I think he is a villain of sorts in this wilderness world story I'm not writing, that has a boy and a dog in it. That I'm not writing.

He's only got one arm. I think.

This is not the finished version. It's just me working out a few things. He needs better trousers.

don't understand the evil eye, or how one becomes two.

2009-09-30T00:03:00.001+01:00

don't understand the evil eye, or how one becomes two., originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

Less happy with this one than I am about yesterday's. Maybe because more planning went into this one. I knew I wanted to draw a man and a dog, wanderers, up on a hill. The sky I kinda made up. The sky is the bit I hate.

Was listening to No Quarter while I worked on it. That might account for why it feels New Age, but not why it feels a bit sucky. It makes me think of those t-shirts of wolves howling at the moon. I switched over to The Desert Sessions, but the damage had been done. I could throw a dragon on there and stick this on a weed tin, it's that big a cliche.

I think I did too many streaks. One would have looked like a shooting star and that would have been dorky. This meteor storm still doesn't say anything worthwhile, however. Also I needed more light by the wanderer's head. I do have a version that's just man, dog and hill against white. I might do another sky if I ever want to work backwards.

I guess it was theraputic to draw. You have no idea how much writing I have to do this week. If storylining built muscles, I'd look like Chuck Liddell by now.

A box to open up with light and sound.

2009-09-28T22:22:00.001+01:00

A box to open up with light and sound., originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

I'm in danger of self-parody here.

An evening doodle. I had a Japanese thing in mind, but I was listening to Fever Ray as I drew and I think that stole from the east and set things in the north.

I used Art Rage for the drawing itself. The watercolour tool for the trees, the chalk tool for the sky and snow and the pencil tool for the shadows. Then I dumped it in Photoshop and threw a canvas effect over the top. Tried out a few colour variations, but I think the grey I drew it in works best.

Maybe one day I will draw a man and a dog to walk the woods.

"And with strange aeons even death may die."

2009-09-25T22:57:00.001+01:00

doompegg, originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

I'm killing time because I'm expecting a phone call.

What I really want to be doing is watching Conan the Barbarian. Absolutely want to be watching that right now. But if I get the phone call I'm expecting, then I'll have to pause it and it'll not be the viewing of Conan the Barbarian I want/need.

I bet I just get a text, after all that.

Anyway. Not sure what I'm channeling with this one. H.P. Lovecraft, me & my usual sunny climate.

It's been a long week at work.

Ssspeakss fluent Ninja.

2009-09-13T18:16:00.001+01:00

Cobra Commander (Time Waster), originally uploaded by Monsterwork.

Hallo.

I'm quicksanded in a script at present. To put a bit of distance between my brain and armageddon I did this quick Cobra Commander. It's not meant to be that polished, but I took more care with it than I wanted to.

Feels like I'm channeling Dave Johnson here. Maybe I'll give the guy an Ice Cream write-up in the next few days as my way of saying Thank you. So don't go Googling him or anything.

Really want to say "This, I command!" but that was Serpentor's catchphrase.

Co---braaaaaaa.

Hurlant.

2009-07-22T22:25:00.006+01:00

Just riffs, really.

Taking a few minutes out from drawing the comic book to just noodle in another direction.

Distraction 1 from the crafting, strict handiwork was to do a looser, much more organic sketch of an idea for later on. I'm at a Hitchcock stage of drawing something step-by-step that I've had in my head in one form or another at least half my life. And it's fun to realise each page at a time (I don't plan past the present page, in terms of layout and defined action. I know the rough direction, but to keep things from going stagnant or me rushing to get ahead, I don't advance until a page is completed.), but my head will wander and get eager for the moments I know are to come.

So I just played with an idea for something that is still pages away. And in less than five minutes I reminded myself I can be a bit of a badass.

Sure. It's not much. If that was a convention sketch you'd be well 'Shit, I could have queued up for Tony Daniel instead of this.' But I'm pleased with myself that I could crank that out without photo references and without any tools past a photoshop brush at 48 pixels.

What's informing my imagination right now?

Michael Moorcock. He's long been an influence of mine. I'm currently reading Corum, which is another Eternal Champion story, joining the likes of Elric, Erekose and the awesome Hawkmoon on my bookshelves. Moorcock is one of those authors with a fantastic output; something like 200 books to his name. It's all the more interesting for me now while I write to formula every day, whether I agree with an idea or not, on Hollyoaks. But in addition to that facet, I enjoy the stories he tells, which by way of a simple (and I mean that in the way some of the best ideas are graceful by the ease with which you can explain them) device are all connected. The Eternal Champion stories overlap in such a way that they can be sequels, prequels and even re-makes of each other, the premise being that one hero is repeated over a myriad of lifetimes and planes, doomed to serve a purpose in the battle between law and chaos. The Eternal Champion will encounter villains and companions that are present in other books and sometimes even call upon the other incarnations of himself for help.

In some ways it reminds me of the Mad Max trilogy. In the sense that they are not strict sequels to one another. They have the same character at the heart, who is tested by similar situations, and is even given a companion of sorts (or at least a figure of dubious allegience who presents Max with opportunities to prove his morality) in the Gyrocaptain/Jedediah the Pilot. But Max the man/name is the only constant across three films. (The other similarity is to the Dollars trilogy, where the Man with No Name (or is it? Because I'm sure he's Joe in one and Blondie in another...) is the fixed point, but doesn't carry anything from one story to the next beyond his ruthless function. (El Mariachi does this a bit more deliberately, I think. A purposeful homage to Leone's loose trilogy.)) If Fury Road was indeed to be set some 4,000 years from now, you could still have Max in it, because he is a mythic, eternal champion. (Although I think the journey is complete. He loses and then regains his humanity in three films. There's nothing we need past that silhouette at the end of Thunderdome.)

The Secret Tower of the North owes something to Moebius/Jean Giraud. The crystal architecture. I used to have a portfolio of his, that I think is lost to time and loft of home. I've not seen it that last few times I've visited mum and dad, it may well have gone with some old magazines to be pulped. All the more tragic because I'll never know. His comics are ridiculously overpriced on Amazon. Of note - Michael Moorcock created a character called Jerry Cornelius that was supposed to be a kind of open source creation - a creator was free to write him and do what they want. M. John Harrison (who wrote Viriconium and other notable sci fi.) wrote a Jerry Cornelius book and Moebius wrote and drew Airtight Garage which feature Jerry Cornelius too. Moorcock later revoked the scheme and later prints of Airtight Garage call him by another name (Jerry Cornelius, and similar aliases turns up in one guise or another in the Eternal Champions saga). Moebius is easily within my top five comic book artists of all time. And he is a concept designer, which is something I always go giddy for.

Dune Stuff

Official Site

The effortless way he draws without having to do endless bubbles for proportions etc...I'm moved by it. I suppose in the same way an amateur athlete can watch sport with a respect that goes beyond aspiration. It might be like that. There's a definite emotion that comes with watching a master at work, when it is something you consider to be your shared field.

Not quite sure what this is, but it frightens me. In a good way.

What I admire right now in artists is the shorthand for visual information. Two others on my top five - Mike Mignola and Bryan Lee O'Malley - can do this thing that I can't. Confidently draw in less detail, and still translate all they need to. Be it something in the distant, or moving fast, or just for dramatic effect. As simple as my art looks, I can't really simplify it further and get across what I want to. My faces can't get any less sophisticated (for want of a better word. Can't get any less basic...) and even then, the proportions seem to get fucked up from panel to panel. Envy. Envy. Envy. I could go in the other direction and go all Geoff Darrow (Not in my top five, but much respected all the same. Google him) but a. I'd never finish the first panel. b. I'm shit at drawing.

Jean Giraud worked on Blueberry. The Western comic book. It's pretty damn sweet. You should look into it.

Moebius also worked on concept design for Les Maitres Du Temps, and I'm going to leave you with the elegant, if somewhat repetetive Jean-Pierre Bourtayre theme music, as I float up to my sky desert on a mechanical bird.

Oh, and these are nice too. There's a Moebius in there somewhere.

http://conceptships.blogspot.com/

"Frankenstein never scared me..."

2009-05-13T23:31:00.005+01:00

Hello. How long have you been standing there? Crickey. Sorry old chum. Been a bit busy. Still am. Not only does my job ask a lot of typing-time, but I'm wrapped up in at least three-other-sit-down-and-writes. The hours I should be calling mine to waste on Gunsmith Cats and Guitar Hero, I'm lending to projects and progress. Someone had to suffer, and I'd rather it was you.

This one is going to be fairly stream-of-consciousness. Not much by way of proof-read, or point. One of the old-fashioned beat-blogs I used to churn out in the goodoledee.

If you're like the vast majority of British kids of my generation, the following image probably means very little to you.

It might be you don't recognise him at all. It might be you can say, 'One of those Action Force lot, yes?'. It might be you recognise him as Snake Eyes, and good for you. And if you think anything like 'Fuck yeah' when you see this guy, then brother, we're on the same page.

The bulk of my classmates coming up played Transformers, or M.A.S.K., but being as pedantic then as I am now I found both lines to be flawed. M.A.S.K. worked on the principle that these were awesome fighting machines disguised as regular vehicles. A Chevy '57 could turn into a six-wheeled battle tank that dispensed mines. A 4x4 would suddenly cleave open and an armoured motorboat would launch from within. The only problem is they were typically the only vehicles you had to use. Miles Mayhem might not suspect that one vintage saloon when it's idling in traffic. But if it's the only car in the playground, then he's going to shoot the shit out of it whether it converts into a APC or not.

In M.A.S.K.'s favour, one of the henchmen, Floyd Malloy, was clearly modelled on Billy Idol.

Transformers confused me even more. You had two robots of about equal size. One turns into a gun, the other a truck, of about equal size. 'Robots in Disguise', sure, but isn't a semi-automatic the size of a one-bedroom flat kinda conspicuous? Wouldn't a giant robot be easier to explain than a handgun that only has to fall on you to kill you? Add to this the robots that aren't about equal size, the jet planes smaller than the ambulance, cassette players bigger than the jet plane...and, a couple of robot dinosaurs and mechanical insects too (it's a weird mark of adulthood that I can embrace the awesomeness of robot dinosaurs fighting a cassette player that ejects A PANTHER now, but I couldn't then. The same way I thought Lockjaw was goofy and Wolverine cool. Today I would so buy a Lockjaw comic over the myriad of Weapon Xers.)

Action Force, Or GI Joe, on the other hand made perfect, well better sense. All of them to scale, (and compatible with the Kenner Star Wars vehicle, a welcome bonus) all of them operating on a principle I could handle. Specialist commando badasses jump in a bunch of helicopters and hovercrafts and go guts and glory against a terrorist threat that could shake the world. There was no need for civilian bits and pieces. No other cars in traffic. No innocents in peril. You made whatever you had into a battlefield and then these guys met, and blood was spilled.

I was playing Action Force right up until I was about 14, I reckon. I was never all that clued in on the comic book mythology - I read a few newsagent Magazines, that stitched together strips and threw in posters and factfiles and what have you. I remember the silent issue, and one where Sci-Fi and a few others (Deep-Six maybe?) where on a crippled Killer W.H.A.L.E. stalked by a lone Rattler. It aped Jaws and even ended with a "Smile you son of a..." as Sci-Fi shot it's fuel tank or a missile or something. (the sound of an exploding Cobra fighter plane? "BITCHOOM!")

The comics, and the line itself owed something to an old Marvel Comics pitch about Nick Fury (Hawk) and his son (Duke) taking on HYDRA (Cobra). The Saturday morning cartoon had another mythology, a lot goofier than the comics, and one with which I'm more familiar. In it Cobra Commander was a cowardly incompetent (akin in sound and manner to Star Scream), everyone shot lasers and never died and Cobra only ever stole momunents or hypnotised people with rock bands. The movie went one better and decided to marry military expertise with Lovecraftian horror as GI Joe discovered the origins of Cobra in a pre-hyborean civilisation called Cobra-la (the writers called it that, a simple riff on Shangri-la, hoping they'd come up with a better name later. Hasbro said 'Fuck it. It's going in.') lead by Burgess Meredith in a flying ball.

None of this really mattered to me, my brother and my Joes.

Our battles were our chance to fudge together as many elements from action movies as we could manage. In many ways this was as much the birth of me as a storyteller as anything going on in school. It was all theft, mind you, but that's where the art starts.

The plot would run something like this:

Cobra would steal a pair of nukes (Thunderball, Broken Arrow). A handfull of trusty Joes, like Barbeque and Dusty, old guard types, would intercept one of the bombs on a relatively easy mission, only to get ambushed and one of the bombs go off. Sacrifical lambs, because what's a story without a revenge element, right?

Blizzard would stumble across Cobra's mountain-top (of the stairs) base on a recon mission. He'd get chased by Fangs as he skiis down the banister (A View to a Kill), and he'd get a signal back to Joe HQ. The gang would mount up. Snake Eyes would parachute in first to disable anti-aircraft batteries - usually an AT-AT, opening things up for a crack squad of Joes in a Tomahawk. Then things go a bit You Only Live Twice as the Joes wreck the base. The narrative trick is to get Snake Eyes out of the way, or else he'll do the whole damn thing single handedly. GI Joe the movie has him captured by a tree. A trained Ninja AND commando, dispatched by a big bunch of vines. FAIL. In the recent Warren Ellis penned animation GI Joe: Resolute, he gets it right. Same device me and my brother called upon. Honour. Snake Eyes would have to break away from the main conflict to confront half-brother and Cobra ninja Storm Shadow (much like Luke can't join in the Battle of Endor)

Jesus Christ this thing is geeky. Like so geeky. There needs to be a regular footnote that just says 'Yes. I have had girlfriends and sex, even.'

A Forero Rocher box filled with water becomes a trap for Flint, as Destro has been told to capture him as a trophy for Cobra Commander (I didn't have a CC figure, so he was always the Blofeld to Destro's Emilio Largo.) At the last minute Tunnel Rat would knock one of the Dreadnoks - let's say Road Pig into the trap, and then he and the watery tomb would go in the freezer, where the cold would then damage the joints or the rubber in the figure and when I next defrosted him, he'd probably lose his leg from the knee down, or even snap at the waist. These figures would later become SFXs of sorts, blown apart by grenades.

Destro would see his plan start to fail, and try and escape. By underground train...wow, I riff on Mission Impossible for this next bit, which means I was playing with these guys as late as, what '95? I'm 15? I lose my virginity in the next 12 months. Christ.

Anyway. A polysterene box that once held my ghetto blaster doubles as Destro's secret railway. Dial Tone, who has defused the nuke sees Destro try and make his escape, and manages to get onboard the train just as it starts whistling down the tracks. It needs to be Dial Tone for the next bit. A Flint, a Hawk a Snake Eyes...they're just too heroic, too capable, too strong. Dial Tone was a good figure, but he seemed like a bit of an underdog, a nerd. Facing up to Destro would scare him.

As Metalhead flies Destro's experimental VTOL Stealth Bomber - made out of an old Y-Wing, down the tunnel, after Destro, to try and save him. Dial Tone, and the metal-faced warlord would battle on the roof of the train. Then it would all crash, and in a bit of a fudge, the underground train would find itself balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff (Cliffhanger). Destro and Dial Tone would have a fistfight, and Destro would lose his footing and fall to a watery grave (A View to a Kill again, or, if Dial Tone kicked him, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.) Just when Dial Tone thought he was safe, Metalhead would emerge, and threaten him once more (the henchmen in most 007 movies), until Flint comes to the rescue by...and this was a certainty...flying a jetplane right into Metalhead.

Mark Millar has done the crash the jetplane into the baddie in both The Authority and The Ultimates. It's a great pay off. Falling is the better pay off, though. It's the Die Hard pay off. I absolutely love the fight at the end of A View to A Kill. An airship, on the Golden Gate bridge. Christopher Walken climbs out and tries to kill Roger Moore with an axe.

Imagine for a second Walken pitching that. His voice.

"Airship. On the Golden Gate Bridge. I...try to...KILL...Roger Moore. With an axe. But, then, I fall. To my doom. And Roger Moore escapes. With Tanya Roberts." (The italics indicates the squinty-eyed throaty voice he does.)

You should watch this.

Stephen Sommers will piss all of that into cocked hat.

Ok. Updates. As this blog thing is dying, I'm going to try and give you something in return. Something ugly, for now, as the medium, the format, isn't quite right.

Monsterwork Comic Books

Also I've added new links up on the sides there. "If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger..." is a really good blog to dip in and out of. I recommend it.

Right. Sleep.

Les temps de souveniers

2009-02-14T23:16:00.003Z

I'm not going to do my usual Valentine's Blog. I don't feel half as bitter as previous years. I feel 'jaunty'. Yes.

I spent it eating desserts (Fruit Cocktail Trifle) and watching DVDs (I gave Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a second chance. It's very comic booky, but still far from perfect) for a change. No eloping to Paris, or last minute mystery rendezvous in the Bahamas. Quite the contrast to previous years.

So here's a picture of my guardian angel Francoise Hardy. And to the hope one day, when I'm racing along La Cote D'Azur in my Alfa Romeo, I will look over to the passenger seat and see the smile of a singular beauty, before she puts some big sunglasses on.

Yes. I would let her have some Fruit Cocktail Trifle too.

Gotta love...#1

2009-02-07T14:15:00.004Z

Gotta love Robert E. Howard.

"Once I killed, with an iron sword I had forged with my own hands, that most terrible of beasts - old sabre-tooth, which men today call a tiger because he was more like a tiger than anything else. In reality he was almost as much like a bear in build, save for his unmistakably feline head. Sabre-tooth was massive-limbed, with a long-hung, great, heavy body and he vanished from the earth because he was too terrible a fighter, even for that grim age. As his muscles and foreocity grew, his brain dwindled until at last even the instinct of self-preservation vanished. Nature, who maintains her balance in such things, destroyed him because, had his super-fighting powers been allied with an intelligent brain, he would have destroyed all other forms of life on earth. He was a freak on the road of evolution - organic development gone mad and run to fangs and talons, to slaughter and destruction." - The Valley of the Worm.

"Konnichiwa. Konnichiwa. It means what's up. So what the fuck's up?"

2009-01-26T21:35:00.013Z

Yes.

2008. Numbers you shouldn't be seeing on the front of your diary, Girls Aloud Calendar or bus pass. It's in the bank. On the shelf. Done and done. Hell, even the Chinese have moved on. We're well into the future.

I hope I'm good to 2009. I did it's older brother a disservice and moped around a great chunk of it, running myself right up until the final hours and thinking there was a lot of sadness there. But I was wrong. The year sure started off sour, but it ended up being incredible. Probably the most monumental year of my adult life. It kinda is where my adult life began. I accomplished almost everything I set out to do and I met a bunch of awesome people along the way. And yeah, the love thing never got fixed and I still think there's nothing more important to a person's life. But hey, I will gladly accept where I am right now for second place.

Love can wait. Hollyoaks can't.

So thanks to everyone who rolled around in 2008 with me.

I know I worked hard getting here, which will account for the lack of blog and probably accounts for why I only saw about twenty films this year. So you are about to read my favourite 50% of movies released in 2008 what I saw. It won't inspire, but there's YouTube embeds, and they're always fun.

Monsterwork's Favourite 50% of Movies Released in 2008 what He Saw.

10. Cloverfield.
A fascinating experiment. A YouTube Godzilla. United 93 if it was about the cast of Gossip Girl trying to escape a Lovecraftian doom. I did feel a bit betrayed by it. The dedication to the 'real' felt fudged by an obvious narrative, certain formulaic tricks. There shouldn't have been a money shot. The monster should have been glimpsed and too big to ever fathom. More than that, I felt there was an end I could buy, a cruel, unresolved end - and then the camera got picked up again and something close to resolution played out. That felt like a compromise to me. Nevertheless it was a pretty rollercoaster and there was no disputing the effectiveness of certain scenes - namely the news footage watched by the looters and the first rumble. I love first rumbles. If I made a film I think I'd start with five minutes of black and a bass hum. Then I might show a chessboard, with the pieces shaking. I love me one of those shots.

9. Street Kings.
Ayers and Ellroy. That's good. We had Harsh Times on the list however long ago. That dirty testosterone feel Ayers is perfecting, married with the blunt trauma Ellroy plotting (minus the trademarks cinema always struggles with - the period element, for better or worse, and the psycho-sexual hang-ups. See DePalma's fumble on Black Dahlia.) Keanu surprises as a meaty, sleazy cop in the Lloyd Hopkins/Dave Klein vein, kicking off the film with casual racism and hardcore violence. It builds, like a lot of Ellroy to an almost superhuman contest between one man and the growing conspiracy. It was a refreshing bit of raw pulp.

8. Quantum of Solace.
The only film I saw twice this year. Largely because I took a girl the first time and she started talking about ice cream at the start, but also because of the pace of it, I really wanted to go back and take more in, now I knew what to expect. From the unconventional opening (I was thrown by the lack of gunbarrel, but now I absolutely love that build from edit and score to the point where the action goes action) and the rest of the stylistic choices (the opera, the location titles) it is certainly the most interesting Bond to look at. I suppose my only regret was it had been sold as a sort of revenge story, but it wasn't. Bond isn't really after Greene (to be fair there is a line in the trailer saying he using him to get to someone else) he's just after the first lead that can take him to Vesper's mysterious Algerian boyfriend. After all he went through for Felix Leiter's leg you'd expect mayhem for the supposed love of his life. The dish served cold doesn't really happen, but the action is there and in spades and little time is wasted. If anything they could have done with a bit more time, Giancarlo Giannini is wasted and there's a bit with two policemen and a trunk that's very 'what?...why did?...I don't get it.' And I realise I'm going to get nothing but Olga-this hooting from the back, but Gemma Arterton is stunning, absolutely beautiful.

7. Iron Man
You know what I liked best about the first Spider-Man movie? All the bits without superheroics in it. All the stuff about his friends and the emo bullshit that a lot of people didn't have the patience for. Iron Man's got great action in it, don't get me wrong, but the dialogue is stellar. Downey Jr.'s chemistry with everyone and everything - he's got rapport with a hydraulic arm, even - is what sells this movie. The climax is weak, it's got that against it. But not by much. There's a lot of detail to enjoy. His HUD and the virtual design tech was all very comic-book cool. It's all out fun, and for the month or so before Incredible Hulk came out, made me think an Avengers movie could be as good as I want it to be (give it to JJ Abrams, please).

6. The Mist.
You know I have a friend who switched The Mist off just after the spiders. Said it was boring. They didn't watch to the end. THEY DIDN'T WATCH TO THE END. I'm not saying or showing anything here about the movie. Trust the pedigree. Trust me. It's good.

5. The Dark Knight
It felt like a violent dream. I came out feeling like I'd survived it. I'm not sure what else I can compare it to. The tension just builds and builds, aided by that dissonant siren in the soundtrack. Ledger is rarely funny, always unsettling. The whole thing came with an ambiguity - was he totally in control, super-sane as it were, and just dedicated to a nihilist ideal? Or was he a dog barking at cars? A bleak, brave film, that still found time to squeeze in a bit of Seventies Secret Agent Batman in the skies above Hong Kong.

4. El Orfanato
Another horror, so I'm reluctant to say much in case it tips expectations the wrong way. It starts off a bit same-old with creaky houses and a spooky mask. Then the heartbreak kicks in and then, then, then...the proper scares. The poop. In the theatre, when I saw it, the audience looked around at one another in disbelief, stopping short of 'Is this film shitting you up as much as it is me?'
I'm not even going to show the trailer (The U.S. market one sucks anyway..."Therrre arrrre childrrrennnn...") Here, watch this safari clip, if you've never seen it before. It's mad.

3. There Will Be Blood
Read something someone educated has to say about this film. Don't look to me. I want to say 'elemental' but I'm sure that's a word I got from The Guardian. At the time I saw it I thought there was a lot of me in Daniel Plainview, and it troubled me. He sits and stares like a dog, full contempt for other people. He also drinks your milkshake.

2. No Country for Old Men

As good as the novel? It just is the novel. Astonishingly so. Looking back at my diary for that day, I wrote 'flawless'. The Coens nailed the humour, the suspense, the violence, the poetry, the visceral impact of the story. It was astonishing. I guess I've got to go back to Cormac and process how a story that you could say is as genre as a David Morrell paperback, with Michael Myers leading the manhunt, is somehow elegant, moving and real.

1.

is....

...not Wall*E. I didn't see it. Didn't see Transporter 3, either...

Pineapple Express is the shit. It's a movie where I kept wanting to go back and see that bit again. I laughed til I choked the whole time. It made me miss my friends, made me miss pot, made me smile from start to finish and it had a big Joel Silver shootout at the end. You want it to magically turn into a dude at the end so you can go hang out some more. I anticipate, much like School of Rock, it will stand up to infinite repeats. Pineapple Express, it's boss lid.

The misfires...well, aside from all that business with the fridge, I thought Indiana Jones' big flaw this year is he didn't really stop anything from happening, y'know? The russkies set out to find something, and although they were pretty thin in number by the time Dr. Jones had tussled, they still found the thing. It just turned out the thing was mental. There wasn't much iconic about it. The narrative was all over the place and John Hurt and Ray Winstone didn't bring any of the richness you got from John Rhys Davis or Denholm Elliot. It was entertaining, and some of the set pieces were good. I imagine I would have liked it more if the lady next to me hadn't just gone 'Uhhhhhh' regardless of whether a moment was funny, exciting or scary.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army was the biggest let down for me. It's odd, given Mignola's involvement and Del Toro's fanboy stance how they could fudge it. It's just not the Hellboy character. Not as I read him anyway. He a morose, kinda lonely guy (he goes drinking with ghosts) who has no problem with the spirit world, he just doesn't like evil. I felt the Perlman version was a bit of a brash bully. It lacked the sadness, and Victorian spookiness I enjoy about the books.

Music.

Crap. Now I've got to think if I bought five albums that came out this year.

Yes. I did.

Kinda.

Monsterwork's Top Five Albums he bought that came out in 2008. Kinda.

5. Justice - Cross

Yes. I know. It came out in 2007. Well I wasn't cool enough for 2007. I had to wait until March or something before I knew. Before I caught up with this. And it's ace. It's only at number five because it's a cheat. It's the best record I heard this year, but like I said, I've arrived late. It might even be the best dance album I've heard, if we call Entroducing a hiphop record. If Fat of the Land had sounded like this, the future would have arrived much sooner.

4. Last of the Shadow Puppets - Age of the Understatement.

I've gone on before about giving Indie rock a wide berth. This might have been an easy sell. It's sort of the Artic Monkeys, sure, but with all the boisterousness taken out and replaced with sixties strings and melody, by way of Scott Walker and John Barry. I don't have to worry about the sweaty fringe and youthful bopping. It's more in keeping with the cardigan comfort I look for.

3. Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV.

One of two, cheap download albums released by NIN this year, the other being The Slip, Ghosts I-IV collects four EPs of instrumental doodles from Trent Reznor's brainpan. They're a mix of Mogwai-ish piano-y fuzzspells, Brian Eno-style ambient wanders and the angry bleeps and beats you've come to expect in the recent Halo## catalogue. At 36 tracks it's a big record and there's a lot of invention and action in there. And it kinda doesn't have to cost you much (unless you like to hold what you own in your hands, like me. But then if you're like me you might tear the sleeve trying to get the inlay card out.)

You can download/order the whole thing here

2. NEON NEON - Stainless Style.

I think this is the album Mike Patton's Peeping Tom project should have been. The alternative pop album. It's fun as fuck, silly but respectful. 'I Lust U' just kills, how did it not exist before? Because the cosmos wasn't ready. A concept album about John DeLorean. A. Concept. Album. About. John. DeLorean.

1. Do I even have to tell you?

I'll admit, I have an advantage here, in that I paid attention. I'd seen them twice during this record's gestation period, so I'd heard some stuff well in advance. I knew we weren't looking towards Appetite with this record. We knew that back in 1991 when for every AFD-sounding Dust N' Bones or Don't Damn Me, there was a bloated Axl indulgence like Estranged or Civil War. This was always where he was headed. And I love it. My favourite Gn'R song is Coma. I love the Axl Rose show. He's one of those fat, nut-job control freak geniuses that I think makes art a bit more interesting. And this isn't a knee-jerk automatic response. I really do like listening to this record. I love 'I.R.S.', 'There Was a Time', 'Better'...the album is tinged with this weird regret/stubborness, Axl knows a great melody, he really does, and the shredding on some of the tracks is ace. The record could have done with more Buckethead and less of the dozen other guys. 'Sorry' sucks outright, but even with one 'never-listening-to-that-again' track in the mix, I still give it my fullest. If only it had come out in 2002 when I first heard most of this stuff...

And I'm going to throw that Buckethead Night Train solo in again because I love it.

Books is where I'll struggle now. I don't think, oh no wait, I read one book printed in 2008 - Dawn Patrol by Don Winslow, an excellent Surf Noir about a private eye on the California coast. It contains the mantra 'Everything tastes better in a tortilla' - the most true truism ever. I did have a bookshelf where all the titles I read this year were lined up but when I moved that running order got messed up, and now I'm not sure. Best opening line goes to David Goodis' Black Friday:

"January cold came in from two rivers, formed four walls around Hart and closed in on him."

That's hard-boiled. You put an egg in a kettle and leave it going for two weeks, and you still won't come close

As I'd paired down on comics early in the year, I missed out on the big x-overs and whatnots. Just realised I missed a Fantastic Four last month even. Getting sloppy. FF has been ace. Ennis' goodbye on The Punisher was a bold move, almost half of it was text, a semi-fictional examination of the Vietnam War with its bitter eyes locked firmly on W. Bush era. Not sure what else set me on edge...Brubaker's Criminal's been strong...uh...wow, I really cut back on comics. What the hell do I read?

Anything else? Best food product? That Rochester Ginger Drink they do in Holland and Barratt. Best item of clothing? My Plastic Man T-shirt from Pull and Bear. Christ, I dunno. You ask, I'll answer.

Damn. I just re-read all this post. It's lame. Where's the wit? Or originality? I guess writing all day for a living really sucks it out of you. I didn't really discover anything. I took albums from the chart wall and went to my multiplex. Gee...what was I up to?

I got my name on the telly. How ace is that? My name was on the telly today. Stuff I did was on the telly today. My ideas. On your telly. Today. Tomorrow. The next day. Fucking mad/amazing.

So, to the year that's begun; Hello. How do you do?
If I can keep my job and keep my friends for another 12 months, I think I'll feel pretty damn rich come two-thousand-ten, Odyssey 2. If I can start 'Ponies Are Not Horses', get words in mouths, and hit up a beach, I'll be an emotional millionaire. If I can make you smile, then golly-gosh, I'll take a bow.

Sharpening the Axe

2008-11-15T21:01:00.008Z

Back when we took ownership of the new millennia, finished with the last, Playboy published a list of the sexiest stars of the last century. With the exception of one or two silent film stars, and studio era bombshells it was largely a list of the sexiest celebrities since 1950. I don’t lend a lot of credence to committee or public voted lists. It’s an entirely subjective system, and so where I might like to know who, say, my friend Tom James thinks are the ten, fifty, hundred sexiest of all time, I’m less interested when FHMs genepool organise their catalogue of white birds off the telly. It’s often frustrating to see which of the least ‘In The Name of The Rose’ looking Eastenders cast makes the cut, over a myriad of exceptionally beautiful, but less-well-known faces. I’m disappointed by the lack of research.

Anyway, if my memory serves me correctly, number one was Marilyn Monroe, number two was Jane Mansfield and the rest of the top five, I think was Cindy Crawford, Racquel Welch and Pamela Anderson, but in which order I can’t remember. With the top two, the editor posed a question. Had Marilyn Monroe never been discovered, would Jane Mansfield have the number one spot, or would she not be on this list at all?

I honestly prefer Mansfield over Monroe. The iconic heavy lidded eyes of Monroe don’t translate to beauty with me, and while there’s no denying she had charm, I’m happier with the cheaper, bustier, somehow more fun-looking Mansfield. The innocence and vulnerability in Monroe feel a bit manipulated and manipulative. But in the record of thing, Mansfield will always seem like the knock-off Monroe. Dannii to her Kylie.

In 1992 Megadeth released their fifth studio album ‘Countdown to Extinction’. It hit shelves just a short while after Metallica had released their fifth studio album, the commercially successful ‘Metallica’. (Which sometimes gets called ‘The Black Album’. I’ve always called it ‘Metallica Metallica’, but on the odd occasion someone came into my old record shop and asked for that Jay-Z album, I would have come back to them with a shiny disc of Bay Area Thrash. For the purposes of this post, I’m also going to call it ‘The Black Album’.)

The Black Album is widely recognised as one of the benchmark metal albums of all time. A critical and commercial success. The trendsetter for years to come. But had it never come out, or come out later, would it have been overshadowed by Countdown to Extinction, a record I feel eclipses the Black Album?

I can see this quandary instigating absolutely zero debate amongst my peers. Perhaps only inviting the unhelpful and inaccurate ‘Black Album sounds like Bon Jovi.’ After last week’s cuntgate it’s probably best I don’t court controversy here.

I don’t dispute the next decade or so of reigning champions. There’s no argument that Korn’s ‘Follow the Leader’, Marilyn Manson’s ‘Antichrist Superstar’ or Slipknot’s ‘Subliminal Verses’ are the pinnacle of Metal at the time, and all spawn numerous imitators (have to say, I think ‘Take a Look in the Mirror’ is the better Korn album, but it’s only them perfecting what they start with FTL). There are other significant albums that come out that have a monumental effect on the metal world, but I wouldn’t actually call metal. So Nevermind, Angel Dust, The Downward Spiral, Rage Against the Machine and Parabola all change the landscape, but I don’t think any of them were metal by design.

In the same year as ‘Countdown...’ Pantera unleashed (that’s a metal word) ‘Vulgar Display of Power’, which is easily more important than both ‘The Black Album’ and Megadeth’s offering combined. From that point onwards almost all of metal sounded like Pantera. If you think you can give me shit about Machinehead, Biohazard or Sepultura being better, you are gravely mistaken. ‘Vulgar Display...’ is a monster.

But that’s not what I’m talking about, really. I don’t think so anyway. It’s this Monroe/Mansfield balance that, for one album at the very least, could have been tipped the other way.

When people ask me what type of music I like I almost always say metal, but it’s not the truth. Metal is the town I grew up in, but I don’t live there anymore. I listen to hardly any metal at all these days, and even back in the day it was just a select few bands on heavy rotation. Like comics and action movies, the bulk of metal is indistinct and shit. Today I will still play Alternative Metal acts like Faith No More, Nine Inch Nails and Tool, and they are the guys I’d call my favourite bands. But Slipknot, Down, Pantera, Slayer, Sabbath even...unless they turn up in the shuffle, they don’t much airplay. Clutch and Gn’R are Hard Rock, right? I still got times for them.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Metallica. I’ve seen them, now five or six times. Never seen Megadeth once. Metallica are gods in my eyes. Untouchable, unstoppable, unbelievable. But ‘Countdown...’ is a badass record. A seriously fast, heavy, savage dog of metal, that would maul ‘The Black Album’ in a one on one.

If ‘The Black Album’ was maybe three or four tracks shorter, this might be a different contest. The arrangement of the songs almost serves to highlight the lesser numbers. Once you get past ‘Of Wolf and Man’ the anthems are over, but the album carries on for the good/ok trinity of ‘The God that Failed’, ‘My Friend of Misery’ and ‘The Struggle Within’. Had these tracks been tucked between the ‘Sad But True’s or ‘Wherever I May Roam’s the record might fare better on repeat. ‘Countdown...’ trumps it by being all killer, no filler. ‘Nothing Else Matters’ Metallica’s first rock ballad, isn’t a bad song. It’s metal’s only decent love song, and it’s a great live moment for putting your arm around someone. But it’s a weak spot when Megadeth are pulling no punches.

It’s unlikely you don’t already know, but I should recap anyway. Megadeth’s troubled frontman Dave Mustaine, used to play in Metallica before they made it big. He got kicked out, reputedly for being an asshole even by Metallica’s standards. (Hetfield today might be a cuddly, reformed rocker, but back then he and drummer Lars Ulrich were jerks much like anyone in any hugely successful metal band was.) He went on to form Megadeth, and although the band have been seen as rivals ever since, Metallica have become the Roman Empire, to Megadeth’s little village in Gaul.

Metallica have had some changes to their line up over the years. Cliff Burton died, Jason Newstead quit. That’s been about it for the bulk of their career. Megadeth’s tourbus has been a lot more unstable – making it a lot more like Dave Mustaine’s band than a band itself. ‘Countdown...’ was the second album from what was their deadliest line-up; Dave Mustaine/David Ellefson/Nick Menza/Marty Friedman. Marty Friedman is the biggest gun in that box. The shredding you’ll find on ‘Countdown...’ makes Kirk Hammett’s work on ‘The Black Album’ stand outside in the corridor. Luckily for Kirk he’d already got solo’s like ‘One’ and ‘Battery’ in the bank. So whereas The Black Album sort of fizzles out, ‘Countdown...’ let’s rip with a dizzying, all-or-nothing exhibition of Mustane/Friedman fretwork. You only need listen from 02.55 onwards.

Ashes in Your Mouth

Kerpow. Hetfield and Hammet between them normally have the edge on Riffs/Solos, but the planets were aligned on the day ‘Countdown...’ was born. Metallica eases you into ‘Enter Sandman’ and from there the album itself. Megadeth don’t want you to put on your seatbelt. They want to smash you through the windshield (I’m trying to channel classic Kerrang hyperbole here. I wish I really did talk like this though). Ignore what Dave waffles on about. The album comes in on that first drum roll.

It’s not a nasty little record, ‘Countdown...’ It’s bloated with concepts and messages, more so than ‘The Black Album’ with its werewolves, nomads and cosmic musings (I first listened to the album on my walkman, reading Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘2010 Odyssey 2’ a book that scared the shit out of me as a kid – the bit with the moss and the bit with the multiplying monoliths are two of the most chilling sequences I’ve ever read – so the ‘Black Album’ and ‘Through the Never’ in particular are inextricably linked to thoughts about space and horror.) Megadeth go all out with nuclear apocalypse, schizophrenia, critiques on canned hunting and Reagan-era economic policy, suicide and in ‘Psychotron’ an unexpected tribute to Marvel Comic’s zombie commando Deathlok. You’ve got to love metal for the stories it tries to tell. Megadeth seem to have more fun, there's more humour on this record. Mustaine's barbed-wire-strangle vocals lends itself better to mockery, than po-facedness.

And...crap. I’m running out of things to say. I struggle writing about things I like. I’m an articulate complainer, which leads most people to think I live only to hate. Not true. I just tend to say ‘awesome’ for the things I think are awesome and essay the things I disagree with. I’ve written some fifteen hundred words on Megadeth now and I’m in danger of saying ‘bitchin’ or ‘gnarly’ because I just can’t write about music. This is kind of a facetious entry anyway. With blogs clogged by Beatles, Brian Wilson and Dylan, I thought the world could use a wake up to the Buzz Aldrin of metal, Megadeth’s ‘Countdown to Extinction’. It's got bigger breasts than the 'Black Album'. That's what I'm saying.

If I keep writing I might forget what weekend this is.

Anyway. See us out, Dave.

Oh. There is a bit in ‘High Speed Dirt’ where Mustaine shouts he’s a ‘dirt torpedo’. It sounds like he’s yelling ‘I’m a dirty paedo’. It’s ace.