Vista crashes are now bluescreen crashes, so I can't take screengrabs of them anymore to fill blog space. It's like the fucking thing is upping its game every time I get a handle on its shit. If Vista had a face I would punch it.
With a fist made of rusty nails and broken glass. That I have set on fire.
And so to comics on Monday, which I need to do in order to force routine on myself as I'm a lazy get with no structure to my life and some days, having to turn on the pc to make a blog post on weekdays is about the only reason I get any work done at all. Below is the first page of Frank, an attempt at little more than accurately representing the horrible screeching nails-on-a-blackboard drawl that is my accent - but on a comic page! It started life a couple of years ago as Your Friends and Neighbors (hence the name of the blog) and was initially a webcomic drama set over thirty years in my hometown charting the disintegration of the tenuous bonds between family members after the death of a child, but those reading my posts over the last two years will probably realise that straight face is not something I do particularly well when there are comments to be made about wanking and/or poop, so it was probably a good thing that I discarded Your Friends and Neighbors and attendant subject matter. Truth to tell, the deciding factor was my just not wanting to do another dreary fucking holiday in misery like pretty much every story I've ever read set in Northern Ireland during the 80s and/or 90s.
I barely remember the 80s and only really got into them in the early 2000s after GTA: Vice City came out, while the 90s were just that time when I discovered music by some very angry, disillusioned, loud or loud incomprehensible scruffy and awesome men that sounded great when you were off your tits on cider - the only time Britpop and Nirvana even appearing on my radar being when Kurt Cobain was murdered by his wi- I mean when Kurt Cobain committed suicide and Britpop shat its pants shortly after everyone realised it was a load of shite made up by middle class journalist twats at the NME who needed reassurance they actually mattered in an increasingly smaller world of information and made up a fictional musical movement for which they could be on the front lines.
The Troubles to me are little more than a vague memory and while it's not impossible for me to do a story set in that time and place, I'd worry that it be deemed a reliable testimony just because of where I happened to have been born, which is ridiculous as I - like many others - insulated myself from the Troubles with music and underage drinking. I thought that was a good plan at the time, I think it's a good plan now.
Anyway: Frank is blog filler at the moment, but hopefully you'll find it goes somewhere later, just not to the Troubles. You'll note that exposition appears on the very first page - not a good sign - and the art is all over the place as I veer wildly between blobby cartoon figures and characters with actual human noses, but otherwise it seems to have stuck to my hope that it be a strip that is not about spaceships, guns, superheroes, monsters or The Fucking Troubles, though it's occurring to me that this leaves me with little to work with. It was supposed to be a five-page opener, but I don't have enough pages done to act as a buffer for my inevitable lagging behind on updates - the curse of almost every webcomic creator - so it's just one page at a time for the moment.
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