The Boy With Supernova Eyes

Mutate Britain exhibition

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:06:02 GMT

So recently myself and the other half went to Ladbroke Grove, intending to call into R Garcia and pick up some Spanish food for the Christmas holidays.

On the way there, we saw this:

It turned out to be a part of the Mutate Britain exhibition. At £2 in, it seemed a really stupid idea to not check it out, so we did so. A morass of photos lies beyond the cut for your visual delectation.

Flickr slideshow:

I was going to embed individual images but since I can't find a quick way of getting the embed code for all 59 of them, I'm just linking to the set here.

Copying Phil Barrett pt 2

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:22:01 GMT

Following on from my earlier post containing last night's doodlings, I did more of the same today over lunch.

Here's the original panel:

My pencils:

Inked:

(These are rushed and the pictures are a bit crap, to say the least - I'll draw some more and post up cleaned-up versions of them tonight).

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:47:45 GMT

While I was chatting to someone at Leeds about comics, I found myself talking about the likes of Philip Barrett and Gilbert Hernandez as the sorts of artists I'd like to try and emulate - because while their work appears simple it's very effective as a visual storytelling tool.

It's occurred to me that I won't learn from them if I don't try to draw in their style and figure out what works for me (or doesn't) and go from there.

Original:

My version:

Original:

My version:

Original:

My version:

Another lunchtime sketch

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:45:12 GMT

As per my last post I've been doodling in my lunchbreak recently, to try and get some ideas for this comic I've decided I'm putting out for the end of March next year. It's been fun so far in that rather than trying to come up with full-length stories I've just been tossing out ideas for one or two pages, including a couple of silent or mostly-silent comics, which is a nice change.

The quality is a bit crap as it's a phone-camera picture rather than a scan - that being said, it's only a rough sketch anyway so the hell with it. For the final version I might make the effort to mimic Jhonen Vasquez's approach on Johnny The Homicidal Maniac, I suspect it would suit the story.

On comics, and amusing foodstuffs

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:12:03 GMT

Ye gods and little fish, it's been 13 weeks since I posted here?! Evidently my previous notion of "journal comics" has failed.

Oh well.

Firstly, I saw this while shopping and figured it should be shared:

On a further note, I was recently at the Leeds comic convention helping to run ztoical's table, selling a lot of Irish independent & small-press comics. It was an eye-opening experience and also a lot of fun. In addition to this, I had drawn a 5-page strip that was part of the 24 Hour Comic Day anthology that Cliodhna had put together for this year's event, as well as drawing a 9-page script for a friend's anthology comic.

I've not drawn much of anything else in the last 6 months. So I've come to the conclusion that I need deadlines to actually make me draw these days, especially if I want to improve.

To that end, I've made a deal with Cliodhna that I'll share a table with her at next year's UK Web & Minicomics Thing. At which I will have a comic of some description which I will attempt to hawk to ~~unsuspecting victims~~ the masses. I've started sketching on paper again as I try to decide what that comic will be, giving me things like this:

I'll try to post more sketches here over the next couple of weeks to build up steam. At some point I have to draw a Christmas card for this year too, but more on that when I get it done...

So 2010 will be the year I take the plunge into putting my comics in print. Eeeep!

Enumerating my scars.

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:07:07 GMT

I don't have many scars. I'm generally not prone to the sort of adventurous behaviour that leads to striking scars and exciting stories. Sure, I have a few, but I've got nothing on a Sagat or The Joker; heck, I've barely got anything on Harry Potter.

The only scars I have with any kind of story to them are the series of pink blotches that are spattered along my left forearm, from the one on the back of my hand to the cluster marching their way to my deformed left elbow (which should be an interesting story, but isn't - the bones in my arm are slightly twisted and the joint is wrong, so I can't turn my left hand all the way around. Sinister indeed).

Those are the series of scars from the summer of 2001, I think, where I got more drunk and miserable than usual one night and decided upon the obvious solution of spending the rest of the night drinking, smoking, and then stubbing out cigarettes on myself. I'm lucky that the scars aren't too bad as they are now, since my immediate reaction the next day was to try and hide them, because I wasn't really sure why I'd done it - or more accurately, I had some idea of why I'd done it, but didn't really know how to put that into words or what I should do about it. So instead I popped the blisters that had swelled up overnight (bad idea), slapped sticking plasters over the popped blisters (worse idea), and pretended I'd had a very unusual skid off my motorbike which led to very very localised grazes (worst idea). This went on for, oh, a couple of weeks, until one of the friends I had at the time spilt the beans to my folks, leading to exactly the conversation I'd been trying to avoid.

I don't remember how it went; I remember that my dad took me to a chemist to get some disinfectant for my arm and proper bandages so that the sores could heal properly. I remember trying to pretend it wasn't something serious and failing, then lapsing into silence.

The sores healed up, but for a long time afterwards I felt very self-conscious about them. For a good while since then, I would realise if I had had one too many drinks because the scar tissue would be bright pink as the blood vessels near the surface of my skin opened up. I started wearing long-sleeved t-shirts a lot around this time, which drew less comment than you might expect considering I was living on the Coast where temperatures regularly went up past 35 Celcius during the day and didn't drop much at night.

As a result of that incident, I realised that I obviously wasn't happy at the time - partially this was down to my social life, which was built up around a few friends who I liked, but routines that I absolutely detested. Dressing up smartly to go to tacky tourist-oriented bars, drink shit lager by the gallon, lurch around in an allegedly rhythmical fashion to the same shit music day in day out, and in my case frequently end up bored because everyone else is on the pull and I'm uncomfortable and don't know what I'm doing. So I said "fuck that!", and started going to a couple of other bars I knew of down dingy back alleys, that served good (and cheap!) beer, played good music, and had a different atmosphere. I knew one or two people who frequented them, and gradually got to know more of them.

This had all been coming for a long time, but I'd been ignoring the problem - partly because it wasn't such an issue when I was in university, but partly also because I was lazy and taking action seemed hard. Heck, even admitting that I needed to properly sort out the mess I'd made on my arm took nudging.

Unfortunately, I didn't admit to myself that part of what was making me unhappy was also that I was out of my depth in college, and hadn't really admitted that to myself (or tried applying myself fully, because deep down I think I was even more afraid of trying my best and still struggling). Which was a bit of a shame, since it led to me nearly failing my exams and still doing pretty badly.

In its own way, though, the whole thing was a learning experience. I've started using Bio-oil a few months ago to try and reduce the visibility of these scars because I don't like seeing them - they remind me a bit too much of feeling unhappy and lost. I don't want to get rid of them completely, though, because they're a useful reminder of what can happen if I ignore a problem.

(The other scar that serves as a reminder of a useful lesson was acquired the summer before the above story took place; I acquired it at the business end of an empty bottle of Smirnoff, after having unsuccesfully tried to prevent an acquaintance from starting a fight with a young Spanish chap and the thirty-odd friends of his my acquaintance hadn't noticed around the corner. Upon failing to prevent the fight, said friends assumed I was involved in the fray as well and clocked me atop the skull. I was fortunate to fall in such a way as to have a low wall and a car between me and the fight, so I got away, and managed to get several metres before realising that I was feeling dizzy and there was blood pouring down my shirt. Upon phoning the emergency services to report the incident, I realised I could probably walk to the nearest hospital faster, and got a taxi there instead, whereupon I got four stitches. After the 48 hours of concussion-watch were up, I realised that the evening's lesson was that sometimes it's not worth trying to stop someone from doing some damnfool thing that'll earn them a kicking.)

On Wii Fit or furthering the resemblance between my posting habits and the regularity of buses

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:01:29 GMT

So anyway, I mentioned Wii Fit earlier and figured I'd write a bit about it.

After returning from San Francisco, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I decided we should do something about our general fitness. We'd been members of the lcoal council-run gym for a year but not found it to be much use because while facilities were good, the location of it was such that we just didn't use it much (getting 30 mins of gym-based exercise would involve between 90 & 120 minutes of time in total). Having been told by a couple of friends about the joys of Wii Fit, we figured we'd give it a go. To make it properly worthwhile, we decided to switch over to a grazing diet too - ie spacing food out into 6 blocks during the day rather than 3, treating 3 of those as "normal" meals only with reduced portions, and filling the rest with fruit.

It's about 3 months since we started, and we've both found it very good. We've both lost well over a stone (I'm down from 13 stone 2 pounds to 11 stone 6 pounds), we're both feeling a lot healthier in general, and it's been a surprisingly easy lifestyle change. Aside from the weightloss the biggest shift has been adding a 30 minute exercise block to the start of the day - we're both so used to it at this point that we don't feel properly awake without going through some exercise.

Hell, the damn thing even got me interested in yoga, which I never thought would happen.

It's not all sunshine and roses, though:

Thus far, I'm very impressed. The fact that I've found a couple of other games which also make use of the balance board (Equilibrio on Wiiware and Shaun White snowboarding) has just enhanced my satisfaction.

I forgot...

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:56:13 GMT

T-mobile bugged me about renewing my phone contract so I now have an Android G1. So far it's fun, though getting used to a phone whose battery life is 2 days or less and has an inferior camera to my old Cybershot will take a while. On the other hand, I've found brain-training games and a crude Mahjongg game, which will clearly ~~consume what litle free time I have left~~contribute positively towards my life. Not to mention being able to use Google Maps on the go for the many times when I get lost...

Ye gods, it's been a month already?!

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:08:46 GMT

So it transpires that I haven't written anything here in about a month - longer if you're looking for anything worth reading. In lieu of an entry that I put time and effort into writing, I offer you mere snippets:

Amusing discussion of all those things cats as vengeance for being left at home for anything more than about 4 hours without either an immaculate litter tray or access to that enormous toilet known to humans as The Outside World.

Moon - Amazing. Having re-watched the trailer after seeing it, it's great how different the film turns out to be in comparison to what the trailer suggests. Best new sci-fi film in a long time; like Sunshine before it, this has references to many of the old sci-fi greats but Moon actually lives up to that promise on more than an audiovisual level.

Rudo Y Cursi - from the same people that brought the world Y Tu Mamá También, possibly the finest film about football that I've ever seen in that the whole narrative serves, in a certain sense, to discuss the nature of the game, while also telling the story of two brothers and the effect on their lives of becoming football stars in Mexico.

Kisses - two kids on the run from their estate (and their less-than-stellar family lives) wandering the streets of Dublin. Sounds twee, but it's not. This is what Thirteen could and should have been, if it hadn't turned out to be a shitty MTV attempt at being down wid da yoof.

Milk - Harvey Milk biopic. Interesting slab of history that I was mostly unaware of, particularly given that after the holiday in SF I now recognize a lot of places in the film. It suffers from the same problem most biopics fall foul of, in that the "moving finale" feels a tad too contrived, but was still decent overall.

Franklyn - Gorgeous visuals but a comparatively weak story. I admire the attempt to use a multiple-lead-cast fractured narrative structure, but as with so many other films before it, the biggest problem with this is the way in which the fantasy world is tied into the real world. (I much preferred the approach Guillermo Del Toro took in Pan's Labyrinth, for instance, where it's deliberately ambiguous). Good, but not anywhere near as good as I had hoped.

Aside from all of that, the biggest notable change in the last while has been the impact of Wii Fit and a modified diet on my life. On which more later, since that deserves its own post, really.

Thanks to eddirt...

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:32:41 GMT

...I have discovered the undiluted glory of ginger snaps and coffee. Yum!

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:08:46 GMT

So I've been very bad at updating this lately, but am making efforts to get better. Since I haven't had much time for comics recently, I thought a couple of photos would be a better idea:

We've had some awesome weather lately, and my parents came over to visit so we took the opportunity to go up to Hampstead Heath. This picture is from the top of Parliament Hill, a spot popular with kite flyers.

This is an older picture I took a couple of months back, on my way home from work. I like the colour and something about it seems representative of Kilburn as a whole.

(On another note, I finally wrote up our second week in San Francisco - the entry, complete with pictures, is here).

Trying out Manga Studio and other such nonsense

Wed, 20 May 2009 22:25:56 GMT

Just a quick thing I dashed off while trying out the demo version of Manga Studio, after hearing Bob Byrne (hereby known as The Spunker speak highly of it.

I'm not too convinced. I like the variety of brushes, it's the sort of thing that I can use ~~to hide the various flaws in my technique~~ to add a bit of flavour to my drawing. But I don't like the interface, and I say that having played with several different packages. I might spend the $50 on it when payday arrives, but thus far I'm not convinced I should abandon Photoshop Elements or Paint.NET just yet.

(The sketch is a preliminary thing trying to settle on a character design for a script a friend asked me to draw; if it works out it'll actually end up in print, which seems more of a baffling notion than an exciting prospect, but there you go...)

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:46:21 GMT

Just over a week ago, She Who Must Be Obeyed and I had an got to spend the day travelling to San Francisco, for a two-week holiday wrapped around a wedding reception for a friend of mine.

Here's what we've been up to:

Saturday - Flight & arrival

As part of the journey, we got to enjoy the delights of Heathrow's Terminal 3 and then the relative comfort of Virgin Atlantic. After hearing some horror stories about United Airlines' transatlantic offering, I think VA are definitely the way to go. We flew economy but still got plenty of reasonable grub as well as access to a quite well-populated in-flight entertainment system. Though there were a selection of decent films on offer, Herself and I both used it as a chance to skim-watch a few films that we were intrigued by, but suspected would be crap. Given the films in question - How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, Max Payne, The Spirit, Mirrors, Choke - we were pretty much correct.

When we got in we were met by Oisin, which meant that the first person we spoke to outside the airport had a thick Cork accent. He gave us a lift to the apartment we'd rented and mentioned a few things that we should try out while we were here. He also pointed out that our efforts to smuggle in a box of Barry's Tea had been pointless since the stuff is so popular here that you can buy it in corner shops. Oh well.

We tried to fight the jetlag and stay up late enough to reset our body clocks, but failed miserably and by about 6ish we had crashed out.

Sunday - Traipsing around the Painted Ladies

We were fairly relaxed in our approach to Sunday, and decided to stroll around and just get to know the place a bit. We aimed loosely towards the Painted Ladies, an area with a bunch of particularly impressive houses, like this one:

While we wandered, we were happy to find that San Francisco, like London, appears to have been planned quite well in the context of greenery and particularly green spaces. This means that you can find quite a lot of places that look like this:

or even like this:

Later on we made our way slowly towards Downtown, where we stopped into a couple of cafés and had our first experience with American beers. On our way back to the apartment, we happened across an urban art installation in the middle of a busy road consisting of a kaleidoscope aimed at the roadway. I suppose if you're going to be stuck on an intersection waiting for traffic to stop, there are worst ways to pass the time than looking at things like this:

After getting home, we once again crashed out early.

Monday - Land's End and the zoo

On Monday we decided to find out what the public transport system was like, having heard good things about it. In terms of information availability the setup is similar to Transport For London and we found the whole thing to be remarkably easy and straightforward. We made our way to Land's End and found it to be rather more spectacular looking than we'd anticipated:

After seeing this we decided to amble along Ocean Beach for a while, heading south towards the San Francisco Zoo. Having discovered that the ocean breeze was a bit more nerve-jangling than expected and that the promenade came to a rather abrupt halt halfway there, we decided to hop on a bus again in order to get there faster. The zoo turned out to be great fun, and we spent several hours wandering around. In that time, we saw:

1) Yet another animal with an interesting ginger hairdo:

(harking back to my discovery of the existence of ginger-afro'd ducks in Regent's Park a couple of years ago)

2) Two grizzly bears playing in the water:

3) A polar bear being outwitted by a miniature plastic iceberg:

(He obviously wanted to climb onto it but since it was just plastic and he probably weighed several hundred pounds, there was no way it would support his weight. However, he seemed to think that batting it from one side of the pond to the other would in some way change this state of affairs...)

4) A duck (reminiscent of Arthur from Sheldon Comics in his brazenness) chancing his wing at getting some food from the kangaroo enclosure - while the kangaroos were busy eating:

Impressive though all of these things were, the most impressive sight for both of us came in a café that we stopped into on the way home after leaving the zoo. Behold - Barry's Tea on the menu!

Tuesday - nerdery and company

After Monday's extended traipsing, Tuesday was spent on a significantly more leisurely exploration of a few shops downtown, which was mainly an excuse for me to wander into Isotope Comics. Wander we did, and I managed to spend around sixty dollars on comics even while making a point of not buying anything I could get at my local shop in London. It was interesting to see that the front of the shop is set up as a lounge area with couches for people to sit and high ceilings whose walls are currently adorned with paintings of original artwork from the 100 Bullets covers gallery by Dave Johnson. All in all it was quite a nice example of how a comic shop can appear welcoming to new readers, what with open space and lots of light and a bunch of displays with recommended reading and so on.

That evening we went down to San Bruno on the BART to meet up with Oisin & Caitlin, as well as Graham and Zamile - another couple of friends from Cork who'd also travelled over for the wedding. We went for dinner and then spent the rest of the evening talking much rubbish over a few beers.

Wednesday - Alcatraz

Any trip to San Francisco would be incomplete without at least mentioning Alcatraz, so we had booked tickets in advance for Wednesday morning. The island is disconcertingly close to the mainland and yet far enough to nobble any attempt to swim to shore. The trip out there is a ten minute ferry ride, after which point you can wander around the island and take a tour of the prison building itself. We had some doubts about the merits of the audio tour at first, but were very glad we took it - rather than the monotonous "This is a jail cell. This is another jail cell. This is a wall where countless tourists before you have beaten their heads in frustration at the sheer monotony of this tour." voice-over we'd feared, the tour is more of a guide to the prison's history and is presented almost like a radio play. Edutainment you can believe in!

The most shocking thing about the island is probably the views it offers:

It seems so incompatible with the reality of a maximum security prison, it's hard to accept that the two are aspects of the same place.

After finishing up our tour of the place (we spent a good 3 hours out there and still hadn't explored everything that was on offer) we made our way back to the mainland and walked around the North Point for a bit. We found a Barnes & Noble where I managed to spend more money on comics, and then made our way home.

Thursday - Death by melted cheese

After a pretty eventful week so far, we decided to take a break on Thursday and just spend the day in the apartment reading some of the many comics we'd picked up. By the end of the day we needed to get out, though, so we decided to try out the Matterhorn Restaurant that we had noticed was just up the road from our apartment. It was certainly a treat - they had decent beers on tap, and I never would have imagined that melted cheese & bread could serve as a great foundation for dinner. We decided to add a selection of cured meat to the meal which gave it a bit of variety, but we both had to pass on the option of chocolate fondue for dessert.

Friday - Fisherman's Wharf

On Friday we ventured back up to the North Point area, this time intending to explore Fisherman's Wharf for its various delights. It's primarily a tourist trap, though it has just enough charm to get away with it - not everything is tacky souvenirs; interspersed with the tat bazaars we found a games arcade, a well-stocked sweet shop, and an antiquities shop with a very particular definition of "antiquities" (given that it mostly sold kitschy Americana junk from about the 50's onwards).

One of the more surprising experiences was the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company. Oisin mentioned this place to us several times so we figured we should check it out even if only to get him to shut up about it, and we weren't disappointed. For a franchise the food was exceptionally good, and the atmosphere of the place (coupled with some great views out over the Bay) was really nice. Neither of us could get this spoof out of our head, though, and had to mention it to our waitress. I'm not sure what she made of it.

Our next stop was the Musee Mecanique , though on the way we discovered the San Francisco Fun Patrol - a fundraising project that works by having official-looking people stop you on any pretext they can think of, giving you some stickers and stuff, then asking you to donate to a local soup kitchen. It seems to work quite well and was a welcome change from the charity-muggers-who-claim-a-wage bullshit that passes for a lot of charity fundraising in the UK and Ireland.

After that we made it to the Musee itself, whose entrance is dominated by Sal, a larger-than-life puppet that laughs demonically for minutes on end if you so much as wave a quarter in its general direction. Disconcerting at first, it's the sort of thing that even Chucky would have nightmares about. Beyond is a surprisingly varied collection of mechanical entertainment machines spanning the 20th Century. Being the kind of twit I am, I was too busy looking at and playing with these things to take many pictures, but this should give you an idea of what's on offer:

Towards the back of the museum there is also a modest collection of recent (ie from about 1980 onwards) arcade games, where amongst other things I got to finally play Battlezone in its original arcade cabinet (rather than via the MAME software emulation project) and shovel yet more money into the Addams Family & Indiana Jones pinball tables.

As we left the museum, we saw a couple trying to restrain a dog that was barking madly at the still-laughing Sal near the entrance. Not the most reassuring sight, really.

On the way home we decided to stop for a break, but since the only coffee shop nearby was a Starbucks (which, on principle, we're avoiding in favour of either local cafés or at least branches of Peet's, a reasonably local chain) we ended up venturing into the nearest pub, a place by the name of Tiernan's. Having prepared ourselves for an overwhelming dose of diddley-Ireland we were pleasantly surprised to find that it was a reasonably decent pub. (Whether that impression would last once the live music started is another question altogether, but one we decided was best left unanswered). They even had Murphy's stout on tap, and it tasted passable if a bit flat (which, considering the stuff doesn't travel well at all to the extent that it's undrinkable in its UK iteration, is impressive).

After a quiet couple of drinks we made our way home, wanting to get an early night in since the wedding reception was coming up.

Saturday - Richmond Point and the wedding reception

The morning was a leisurely affair and we were on our way by about noon, given that we would be catching the BART up to Richmond and then taking a taxi to the hotel. We were blessed with a cabbie whose hearing was deficient but inventive, which meant that we got to see the Hilltop Mall despite having asked him to take us to the Hotel Mac and led to him racking up (and then waiving) a $40 fare on what should've been a $12 trip.

But hassles aside, the reception was very nice. Having not been sure what to expect (to the extent that I didn't know whether there would be a ceremony or not, since Oisin and Caitlin had already been legally married about a year and a half ago before returning to the US) I had gone for the "safe" option of full suit, which was fine until I realised I was probably the most formally-dressed person there. I resisted the urge to fix this by wearing my tie Rambo-style about my forehead, though I'm sure it would've looked fantastic. The rest of the evening passed with a free bar (which seemed a shockingly foolish idea considering there were at least 60 people there, including several visitors from Ireland, one of whom started the barman fairly early on with the idea of Irish Funeral shots) and a decent amount of food. The initial party wound down at around 9, at which point the hotel was closing for the day, and we said our goodbyes - a contingent featuring mostly Irish people was continuing the party at a club somewhere in Richmond, but we decided we were already filled with enough beer and should probably start on the trip home. This trip involved a taxi, a train, junk food, a bus, a last-minute dash into the local shop for vital supplies such as ice-cream and milk, and then bed.

All of which brings us to the exceptionally lazy day we've been having today. Our hangovers weren't bad at all, though I suspect that Graham in particular (biggest fan of the Irish Funerals and serial imbiber of cocktails for the evening) is probably feeling distinctly seedy and the rest of them are unlikely to be doing much better.

Next week has a few more delights in store for us: we've yet to check out the maritime museum in North point, we have an aerial tour of the city booked for Tuesday, Oisin has mentioned a desire to take Graham and myself to a shooting range, Deirdre wants to take a day trip up to Berkeley to have a look around, and there's still plenty more of the city for us to explore. Then we make our way back on Friday afternoon, arriving in the UK on Saturday morning.

A quick sketch

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:42:20 GMT

I haven't been very good at posting here recently, which is a shame - I've already mentioned about going to the Thing last weekend (where I took barely any photos, hence not uploading them), but I haven't been doing anything much comic-related. Well, other than getting people to contribute to The Book O' Flange at the post-Thing pub session. (On which more when I've scanned it and assembled the pages in Photoshop - I now regret choosing to use an A3 sketchbook for it, but there you go...)

Anyway, after finally finishing the next Fyshbowl Comics strip (only a month late!) I figured I should do some sort of sketching, and decided to sketch the central character for a project I've been planning for a while. I've got the script side of it worked out properly now, so hopefully it should start to take shape soon.

Enough of my rambling, and on with the sketch:

Of course, all of the above statements about drawing fail to take into account two things:
1) I'm away this weekend for a wedding and then for a two-week trip to San Francisco, during which I'll probably post up tons of photos but no comics.
2) We've recently gotten a Wii in the house, which threatens to awaken my dormant videogame addiction in ways that even Tenchu: Stealth Assassin Destroy All Humans! has thus far failed to do.

The un-updateable

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:36:59 GMT

Excuse the lame south-park-based joke in the subject there, I couldn't think of anything less stupid. The new series of South Park has been unexceptional, although it did offer unexpected gold in the line "You shouldn't use the word fag, it's a hate word and it's insensitive to butt-pirates".

Anyway. More important is the fact that last weekend I attended the UK Web & Mini Comics Thing, as well as the Post-Thing Thing. Much fun was had, chiefly with the creation of the Flangethology - a sketchbook in which a whole bunch of people contributed doodles, sketches, and short strips. It ended up at 12 A3 pages + cover, which will be scanned and uploaded for your viewing delectation in the next few days.

Another trip around the sun succesfully completed

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:46:13 GMT

So with relatively little pomp and fanfare (unlike, say, Gabe from Penny Arcade) I have succesfully achieved a +1 to my age. You'd think that I'd have a more interesting thing to associate with getting older than "Hmm, I guess I'll definitely be older than my brother was when I finally get a full driving licence". Nothing about, you know, maturity or any of that gubbins. Wheee! BUMS! And other such guff. I guess the whole "Growing old is mandatory. Growing up? Not so much." thing is true.

No illustration this time because I've got no time. New comics soon though.

The many many reasons I should never be given any significant authority

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 23:25:02 GMT

It's been interesting to realise over the last year or two that I hold a few convictions which would probably make a significant number of people categorise me in the same mental bracket they reserve for those homeless guys who shout, in a Foul Ole Ron manner, about being spied on with invisible pink unicorn lasers and how monkeys stole their face. Or perhaps those people who think that they've seen the Virgin Mary's face in their faeces after going for a particularly hearty bowel movement.

Then again, a lot of people are pretty damn stupid. But anyway,

1) Free market capitalism should be restricted to luxury goods, where "luxury goods" are those goods whose complete and permanent absence from an individual's life would not cause any significant detriment to their wellbeing. Large TVs, cutting-edge entertainment systems, sports cars, etc. Anything like food or supplies that we depend on? Regulate food production and pricing, with defined price bands that are strictly adhered to.

2) Contraceptives in the drinking water. Partly because of concerns like this, partly because it's too easy to get pregnant and far too many people have kids that they are unwilling and/or unable to care for. Want to have kids? Complete an education/training course that ensures you have the skills required to look after a child. Psychological profiling is something I wouldn't particularly want to see introduced here other than for mental illness. But people not being able to have a kid without planning it first? That's what progress would smell like.

3) A good 50% if not more of universities would cut down the number of undergraduate courses they offer and replace them with apprenticeships tailored for people wanting to get into particular industries. Academic courses should be about the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, not butchered into saving corporations money on training their prospective staff. Thus, anyone doing a degree should at least have significant prospects of making use of that degree in an academic environment. Not interested in academia long term? Fair enough, make use of the expanded and improved apprenticeship/training programs offered instead.

4) Given that global resources are limited, I'm heartily in favour of proper resource management at a global level. Which includes setting population caps. Whether we like it or not, this planet can only sustain so many people. The demands of some beard in the sky are not a good enough reason to bring about a situation involving more mouths than there is food to go around. Neither is "but adopting just isn't the same, I want to have my child, my own flesh and blood".

5) Elections should take longer. Not the build-up, the actual voting. Why? Because, in my world, everyone has to take a test featuring 20 questions (out of a sample bank of a couple of hundred, randomly chosen for each voter) intended solely to test that voter's knowledge and understanding of the manifestos of all parties up for election. Can't prove that you understand the conservative party's economic policy? Back to one of the many aides who will try and explain it to you, using the independently-approved neutral body's documentation detailing the specifics of each party's/candidate's policies and proposed implementations. Sure, it won't stop someone who wants to vote for their local lefty candidate from doing so regardless of policy, but it forces them to properly pay attention to all the options. Basically this is more about removing the right to complain that you didn't know what you were voting for.

6) Legal rights would kick in at the age of 18 pending a series of tests, both psychometric and intellectual, which would determine your ability to actually comprehend the rights and responsibilities in question. Unfortunately, this would mean that some people would never attain certain rights. However, it would also mean that idiots who can barely comprehend the logistics of handling a web browser would have to work damn hard to prove that they should be trusted behind the wheel of a car, for example. Oh, and those rights? Like your driving licence, they expire - regular mandatory re-testing would be involved here. (Not all rights would depend on passing tests - certain aspects like entitlement to medical aid, basic human rights, the right to vote once you had proven an understanding of the policies proposed by the candidates; these and probably a couple of others would remain inalienably yours).

7) I would force the legal framework to function on the basis that crime can only be considered to have happened when thought is translated into action. Someone who creates pornographic cartoons featuring apparently under-age characters, but who has never shown any intent to abuse children or molest them sexually, would not be a criminal under this system. I'm not yet decided on whether criminalising wilful stupidity would be a good idea, but I'm seriously tempted.

Anyway, now that I've alienated some more folks with my delightfully communist anarcholibertarian cryptofascist pro-gay-life-marriage views, here's a doodle of an idea that occurred to me this morning. Guantanamopoly - the prison property management game for all the family! Manage the transition of your prison facility from being the number-one international venue for human rights abuses to a venue promoting the pointless incarceration of criminals and the regular occurrence of male rape! Fun for the whole family! (Rendition equipment not included).

Falling to bits

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:17:26 GMT

This is just a short update. I'd planned to do a longer update over the weekend including a couple of Valentine's Day themed doodles I'd drawn but frankly I couldn't be arsed spending the energy on commenting at the time. my_window_seat had the funniest take on it I've seen in a good while, which is online over here.

I've been very aware of getting older lately, for a few reasons. Friends my age having kids, family members having kids, changing tastes in things like music, and a general sensation of becoming a bit more comfortable in my own skin.

So far so good, except for the whole physical aspect of it. I'm on my way to having that "distinguished" look about my hair, I should be in better shape than I am (an ongoing work in progress) but oddly the thing that gets me most about it is that the skin on my face has flaky days and just seems to come off really easily. Visions of leprosy race through my mind and I suddenly understand why the male cosmetic industry has taken off in recent years.

A quick illustration for your viewing delight:

Snow part 2: Frozen Boogaloo?!

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 08:41:47 GMT

So I woke up this morning to discover that it's still snowing, to the extent that the bus network is suspended. The tube network is mostly suspended. Trains aren't running. Which means that neither myself nor She Who Must Be Obeyed can make it to work. I'm curious how this is going to work out, since the weather reports suggest that there's going to be even more snow during the day - up to another 5-10 inches. It's not much, but in a country not particularly adept at handling snow it's enough to screw everything up.

That said, as I was taking photos this morning I heard a passing individual mention to someone else that he'd never seen so many people smiling in the morning.

This last one comes via Photoshop - a vertical panorama from the floor outside our patio door to the garden beyond. The elevated patch you can see on the floor is the doormat.

First short entry of the new regime

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:26:39 GMT

I've spent longer than I cared to at my computer doing comics over the last few days, and haven't produced as much as I wanted to. Hence this entry is shorter than the previous ones have been, and will feature no comic. However, in lieu of comic I give you 8 photos of the snow - yes, snow - that has arrived like some form of icy alien invader today.

I also give you comics-by-proxy since both The Fyshbowl and the Irish Comic Challenge have been updated with new comics today.

Schoolday reminiscences

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 12:53:10 GMT

It's funny how some things can seem utterly normal to you until you explain them to someone else. This came around after a lengthy conversation about teachers, which made me realise that the secondary school I went to had some real weirdos there. Some great teachers too, but even so....

Mr. E:

A sports teacher primarily, although I think he taught some other subjects, Mr. E was rumbled as a bit of a creep fairly early on. He was the kind of sports teacher who'll go out of his way to let the guys play soccer to keep them on-side (see what I did there? hohoho), and will essentially have the girls swimming whenever possible and have them playing volleyball the rest of the time. Yeah. Bad enough, but compounded by his disappearance from the school shortly after a Duke of Edinburgh weekend outing that he was "assisting" with where a girl alleged that he had tried it on with her. (The girl in question told me at the time that he got a knee to the bollocks for his troubles, which was less than he deserved, frankly).

Mr Director-guy:

Director-guy wasn't actually a teacher as far as I know. He was brought in to sort out the business and administration side of things after his predecessor had done some sort of horrible book-fiddling exercise to keep the school afloat. He was pretty good at making the school a success from what I recall - the number of students went up significantly between when he started and when he finished - but he wasn't above reproach. One of the rules he brought in was a firmer stance on school uniform, and a particular focus on girls' skirts. The stated rule was something like the bottom of the skirt must be less than one handspan from the bottom of the knee, a rule I saw him enforce on several occasions using his own palm. Why a ruler and a metric measurement wouldn't have sufficed, I don't know.

The Sarky Historian:

This was probably the only odd-ball teacher who wasn't creepy. He was odd at times, but mostly because his approach to classroom management was mercenary in the extreme - he ruled with an iron fist of humiliation and wit. If you could hold your own against him in a battle of jokes, you would essentially get away with plenty of things. My definitive memory of this teacher would be his put-down of a particular student who was an enthusiastic early adopter of the fashion whereby your brand-name Y-fronts stick out over the top of your jeans (because you're deliberately letting your jeans hang low). In order to fully demonstrate the implications of this fashion for the student's modest football abilities, this teacher dropped his own trousers to his ankles in the middle of the classroom, revealing shockingly bright green boxer shorts, and proceeded to pretend to fall over himself while trying to kick a football. It had us in stitches at the time, but by the time we were moving on to the next class we realised how weird it would sound if we were to describe it to anyone who hadn't been there at the time.

Mr. McWiggly:

Mr McWiggly (so nicknamed by the Sarky Historian, who took an instant dislike to him for having all the sense of humour of a dessicated slug) was originally brought in to replace Mr Director-guy, and was ostensibly a far more traditional British school headmaster than previous directors had been. Initially, the view was that this would be a good thing - he had an impressive track record, his wife was also a teacher, and they had three adopted children (which apparently proved their track record with children).

He brought with him changes of a kind I have since learned to recognize as window-dressing - the intent of the changes being not to achieve anything even remotely useful, but rather to serve as a statement that the new boss is here and is emphatically not like the old boss. One of these changes was to alter how the morning assemblies were handled - every Friday there would be a morning assembly for half an hour in the main hall, with every second assembly featuring a play or some such entertainment by one of the drama classes. Before the arrival of McWiggly, the assembly hall would be set up with seats for all students, which would take about 20 minutes for the two custodians to set up. This was unacceptable to McWiggly. Only teachers and Sixth Form students would get chairs - the rest could sit on their arses on gym mats. On a cold ceramic floor. This freed up the custodians for an additional 10-15 minutes on Friday mornings, during which they could struggle to find something else to do instead.

Needless to say, this was eventually changed back when a large number of parents complained that their children would risk piles because some headmaster ponce was being precious about putting chairs out for them.

The McWiggly story got really interesting towards the end of his first year, when worrying truths became apparent. When the weather got warm enough to allow students to swim during PE class, it suddenly came to light that the Traditional Headmaster was particularly traditional when it came to discipline, and was in the habit of caning his adopted children. The consequences of this became apparent very quickly, with Mr Director-guy reinstated quite speedily and Mr McWiggly given the boot equally speedily.

The ManChild

The ManChild is by far the worst of them, though. Whether you found him to be an engaging and interesting teacher or a borderline predatory pederast depended on whether you had a Y chromosome and an attractive physique. He taught English, and did so quite well - not as well as he would have liked to think, as there was a little too much of his personal bias present in the syllabus, but he did a good job of challenging people to think and nurturing critical analysis skills. I got on very well with him as a person. I stopped taking his classes after GCSE-level due to subject clashes, but he made time to talk to me about books and suggest things I might enjoy - and in fairness to him, there were a few other students for whom he did the same thing.

All of which pales to insignificance in light of some of his transgressions. I refer to him as ManChild because he had a serious Peter Pan complex. He must've been in his early 30s when he was teaching me, but he still used to go out to the same bars as the sixth form students, and frequently went drinking/substance-abusing with them. On the one hand, this was seen to be part of him "understanding them" and being cool and thus someone who could be trusted (as though learning things from him wouldn't really be learning, or some equally stupid notion). On the other hand, he frequently tried it on with students. Several people have independently alleged to me that in the years before I was at the school in question, he was caught having sex with a 13-year-old girl. I have no idea whether that is true, but it doesn't sound out of character. This is a man who ended up dating a girl in my year as soon as she was no longer a student. He ended up marrying her, which shocked us all. Whether he still teaches or not, I have no idea. He was a very good teacher when he wanted to be, but it can't be worth having a sex pest on campus no matter how well they educate their victims.

Mind you, there were some odd-ball students there too. I don't know as many entertaining antics on the student side (aside from some of my own, which were rarely that entertaining, although a future post shall be filled with them), but suffice to say that specimens like Jamal didn't exist in a vacuum...

Frost/Nixon

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 23:24:02 GMT

I was planning for the next update to be a bit lengthier, but then a really stupid joke occurred to me. I was working on some comics for the Comic Challenge, and the trailer for Frost/Nixon started playing on TV. Not the full one I've just linked to, but an abridged one. And I'd swear that they picked Nixon's lines in the ad to make the film sound like something between a serial killer thriller and a slasher flick - an impressive way of selling a film that's effectively about interviewing a corrupt politician.

Anyway, the ensuing conversation between myself and She Who Must Be Obeyed led to the following:

Well, it made me laugh.

Starting over from scratch

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:59:24 GMT

A couple of days ago I spent some time deleting the 700 or so entries I've made in the 7 years since I started this journal. Partly because the last year or so of posts (probably more, in fact) have had little or no merits, and partly for the sake of having a general clear-out. I want to change how I use this journal and see if I can make it into something actually worth reading.

One of the things I'm working on doing more this year is reading: in general (since I keep neglecting prose reading for comics reading) and also specifically in terms of science. On which note, I offer you the following (based on something I scribbled down in the pub recently):

Speaking of comics, I have decided to temporarily put a halt to the Coasting story that I was doing, and have started a new storyline on The Fyshbowl. The plan is to continue this as a weekly endeavour for the short to mid-term and see where that leads me in terms of longer-term comic writing/drawing.