Those teenage girls you play ping-pong with are doing it ironically

Thankfully my Robocop-watching fugue seems to have passed, aided by The Future of law Enforcement, pilot episode for the tv version of the franchise, which despite my enjoying it through fresh eyes a couple of years back, I couldn't bear to watch the whole way through this time, even with a script by the writers of the first Robocop movie.  I do find the idea that Robocop couldn't ever have been a viable tv project rather strange, however, not so much because of the stuff telly makers can get away with showing these days but because there's plenty of mileage in the concepts at play in Robocops 1 through 3 to support a tv show even without the robo-rozzer at the center of things.  Instead of castrating the violence, a better approach might just have been to clumsily obscure it and make it seem like the work of tv censors trying to make Robocop's excesses palatable for tv viewers, seeing as ridicule of the media was a strong thread not just in the films but in the tv show as well, sometimes to surprisingly good effect given how naff RtS is in general, as "Up after the break - Scottish liberals resume mortar attacks on Liverpool" delivered in a deadly serious tone by a newscaster will never not be funny.  I guess nowadays Robocop would just have been a spoof reality tv show, with a camera crew following Robo around as he brutalises his way through the working and poverty-stricken classes for the amusement of - oddly - the working and poverty-stricken classes, interspersed with interviews with characters important to some ill-defined larger plot arc, but even then I think that might still be pretty entertaining, if only because it couldn't possibly be worse than Death Valley.
Back to posting Frank pages again as I didn't get near any work today - nothing Vista-related, my hands were playing up again so I just couldn't be arsed.

I really need to work on consistent line weight between my foreground and background inking, and to stop using checkered patterns to fill empty space.  Scriptwise, I think pretty much everyone says to not do huge swathes of text in balloons and to instead put it outside panels or something, and I suppose the alternative was that one balloon on top taking up the whole page if split into smaller chunks - but bollocks to that, as this story has taken forever to get nowhere as it is.

I think crystal meth may be clouding your judgment

Looks like I'm back to posting Frank to fill blog entries for days when Vista won't play ball (weekdays) or when I haven't got any work done (also weekdays), though you can whistle for coloured pages, ladies, as I've learned my lesson there.  A pity I did not learn lessons about anatomy while I was at it, or as an art scout helpfully offered: "the breasts are too small and none of those men have guns."   Then he went on to complain that he could tell what was happening, and that not enough of the corpses looked like his mum.  Not that I'm bitter.

Watching:
Robocop 2.  AGAIN.  I have this crazy notion in my head that for all its nasty, brutal idiocy, Robocop 2 is a perfect sequel to what started in Robocop 1.  Robocop 1 was about corporate America, Robocop 2 is about consumer America, and Robocop 3 is about Robocop in a jetpack, which is a bit like giving a shark a machine gun: it's awesome, certainly, but why does he need that?  Or possibly Robocop 3 is about the faceless, greedy consuming and corporate rabble of the first two movies being real people with families and communities and not just the punchline in an ever-more-violent movie joke, with the quote that sums everything up arguably being "It's like the fall of Rome around here" in much the same way Robocop 2 could be summed up by "Neighborhoods are where bad things happen" and Robocop 1 with "I'd buy that for a dollar!"
Or maybe Robocop 2 is just a movie made by people with a very low opinion of America... I'm not sure - perhaps that's why I'm watching it again.  It tasks me.

vague sexual threats in a frankly unintelligible dialect

It was while watching Footloose that I first realised that I was out of step with popular opinion as regards big movies, as I was on John Lithgow's side. I mean he pretty much goes apeshit when he sees a book-burning and turns on his conservative peers all like "Man what the fuck you doing?" and starts on the road to changing his mind about some stuff he got wrong. He's a decent guy, and that movie is much better if you go in thinking it's pretty much about him and not the douchey Kevin Bacon character who goes through the whole film telling people what to do and learning fuck all.
Anyway, I found myself not getting on with X-Men First Class because it seems to be a movie about a rich old-money white guy who's never worked a day in his life meeting a death camp survivor and telling him to get over it for two hours. Seriously, the first view we have of Charles Xavier is one of privilege, of him insulated from the war that grips the rest of the world and reduces America to rationing and Erik Lensherr to the subhuman status of eugenics experimentation subject in Auschwitz, and Charles has figured out that the woman in his kitchen is not his mother because - and I swear I am not making this up - she wouldn't bring him hot chocolate, she would have his servant do it. For the rest of the film, Charles makes a point of telling grown adults - most of which are working class, I notice - to hide what makes them different and not make waves and this is the problem with the film for me - it assumes Charles Xavier is in the right despite his glaring moral conservatism born of a lack of worldly experience that feeds the status quo rather than helps society evolve. He's no role model, using his parents' wealth to live a life of luxury and gain a university education with Raven draped across his arm like an ornament, all the while using his own powers to help him pick up women in bars (rohypnol not being invented yet as the film is a period piece), and then... well, to be blunt, then he starts telling a Nazi hunter that maybe he should let it go already. He looks a death camp survivor in the eye and tells him that he's wrong to want revenge on Kevin Bacon's Nazi eugenics scientist who is now attempting genocide once again. This is a movie where the good guy is someone saying someone is wrong to kill Super Hitler even though the film actually paints its protagonists into a corner and makes it clear that the character's death is the only thing that will stop him exploding and causing nuclear war.
The text of the film is disastrously muddled, with Erik accidentally causing Charles to be injured and immediately becoming repentant for his actions now that he's seen they have consequences, yet Charles doesn't forgive him even though throughout the entire film he's been telling Erik to let go and move on and somehow even though this inability to forgive births Magneto, Charles is once again in the right. To recap: X-Men: First Class is a film about a wealthy white conservative who is stabbed in the back by a bitter jew - an immigrant, no less - who doesn't know his place.
Oh, and the only black female member of the team is a stripper, who also betrays the team first chance she gets - was this movie written by middle class white people? I can't really tell...

Green Lantern was shit, too, but for entirely different reasons. I'm not what I would describe as a Ryan Renolds hater or fan, but he really needed some funny lines and to be doing his typical schtick in this. He doesn't, so what's already a mess is now a charmless mess. Meh.
Dropping some Frank on y'all...

Got some major problems on this page as I'm only now getting back to trying to draw, but what jumped out at me was the huge hands when I try perspective in that first panel. They look huge like you see in them Mike Deodato comics. Then I fucked that perspective up in the last panel. Plot wise I'm really regretting the decision to not bring in the characters' circle of friends until later - it does focus the plot, but gives me no room to do much of anything in terms of building character.

A furious customer punching a prostitute in the face because he's sickened by his own desire

It is pissing over here. You know when that fruitloop was banging on about the end of the world a couple of weeks back? It was pissing on the day he called as Rapture, and I thought the rain was pretty biblical and appropriate - not to the point I believed him or anything, on account of him and his Rapture shite being johnny-come-lately stuff that sounds like a child came up with it. I mean, someone really should have been a mate to the guy and pointed out that basing all his maths on what people assume was the exact date of that Noah's Ark thing that didn't actually ever happen was possibly not a good idea. Mind you, he got through the last end of the world he predicted, so I imagine he'll be fine. Rich, white, conservative, and fine.
Posting a bit late, but please bear with me...

Well this page didn't go into the shape I wanted it - you know, unlike all the other pages which were concisely worded, tightly focused, and advanced the plot. This is a halfway mark of sorts, and I think I've introduced the vague theme of lies and ennui in a small town where - I think I am being fair here - the only notable feature is the option to drive straight through it on the way to somewhere else without ever having to turn a corner. The idea is that all the principle cast are introduced within the first twenty-two pages and that this will make a 'chapter' of sorts so I can stop pretending there's anything linear about what I want to do and instead switch to time-hopping vignettes like comics machine and 2000ad regular Bob Byrne manages to do each week without his wrists knackering themselves, the jammy fucker. My only solace is that Byrne is a southerner and thus destitution is his constant companion, though it's small comfort as he lives in Spain now and doesn't even need a roof on his cardboard box because of all the sun. God, I remember sun...

I never disrobe before a gunfight

It's a bank holiday over here, and I hope it finds you well wherever you may be.
I shall try and make a meal of this first post in a while though not much has actually transpired in my world since last we spoke - did a little (aheh) drinking, added a quite epic bleeding injury to my list of current poor health symptoms, and altogether been quite bored, but I now realise I have to push onward and manage the RSI rather than hope it clears up on its own and stays away, which means getting back to the arty nonsense and getting David, Dirk and Lee's stories finished so I can stop holding them back.
Little else has been going on, though I did have an interview with the Job Center people and in a break from tradition where the interviewee doesn't turn up, the interviewers didn't turn up. This is out of the box thinking, Cookstown Job Center, and I thoroughly approve. Actually opening your high street office, even for interviews you have set up yourselves is just so mainstream and conformist.
Apparently I have been unemployed and seeking employment in "art and design" for over a decade, which was news to me as I only moved into that area about 18 months ago after working on and off for a small design and printing firm after a decade in construction jobs. "Art and Design" being an arbitrary and general tag that only made sense when I realised this was actually an NVQ I took whilst in school. Some may mock the complete inability of Job Center staff to notice ten years of employment - some of which was in another country, and some of which came about after they themselves referred me to the employer in question - but I personally approve of this thinking where what you've actually been doing for ten years has no bearing on what you might be qualified to do next, and instead you're held to an arbitrary decision made in your youth that you can't even remember as it happened when you signed on for a summer before going to college and had since forgotten all about. I like the notion that there are people going into the Job Center without NVQs or A-Levels and are held to their earliest career choices "It says here that you want to work as a fire engine and/or dinosaur wrestler..." Only in Cookstown could you be going into some Job Center interview thinking you've got no prospects in a downturned economy and someone sends you to Gwangi to learn how to put the Shamrock Anklelock on a velociraptor - how great is that? This is why Cookstown is tops and all other small towns can suck it.

As you may be aware by now, I would never go so far as to call myself entertaining, having been described by my internet stalker as "not funny" shortly before he went on to become a 2000ad regular (so he would certainly know), so you shall have to to accept when I say that my actual Job Center interview was not as entertaining as I make it sound that this is a relative evaluation on my part of what I've written above. The actual event was more of a frustrating, vaguely surreal exercise in futility. And with that seamless link, here is the next page of Frank...

This page means an especial amount of nothing as it's little more than a personal joke. I used to work with a guy who was literally not smart enough to work in a McDonalds - though I feel compelled to point out that "there was no harm in'im" as is proper 'round my way when telling amusing stories about the misconceptions of others - and one time as we were talking about old television programmes, he asked why the Russians were the bad guys in so many shows and so I pointed out that the Cold War was not a fictional construct but a real thing in the real world and this trickled down into entertainment by being a component of or basis of almost every movie in the 1980s. Somehow he took this to mean that James Bond was based on a real person and Star Wars was at least partially factual, though to this day I have to believe this was a result of my poorly explaining things as otherwise I would be forced to go to my grave regretting that I didn't take a shotgun to work one day and end things as God intended. I'm not even joking, he once asked of Ozzy Osbourne from Bo Selecta - this fella here:

He once asked in all seriousness if those were "his real arms."
It was around this time I realised I could do without that job and since then those encounters have come to embody that nagging feeling that there's something wrong with you when you can't bring yourself to say "I'm better than this job" because you are. You always are because people do not live to work and their job doesn't define them, but sometimes you just get stuck, you know?

Anyway, that's what this page is about, but worryingly I seem to have kept this post to a general theme rather than rambled on as usual about unrelated guff, so here's an unnecessary video of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century set to Phunkk Mob's "Only Hope"

I have fond memories of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as it was a product of producer Glen Larson's fondness for macho male fantasy that gave us Battlestar Galactica and the Fall Guy and many others: shows that fetishised the drinking, womanising, gambling adventurer of lore one last time before ensemble casts and AIDS ruined such notions forever (and to this day I will continue to argue that the original Battlestar was a more consistent, foward-thinking and inclusive beast than the scattershot and ultimately disappointing remake), and while star Gil Gerard had a point in that Buck was a bit of an arsehole for not showing remorse or sympathy for the people who were dying around him, it's a fantastic bit of early 1980s cheese best summed up by my first memory of it: I got a phone call from a mate that went "BRYAN TURN TO BBC2 RIGHT NOW!" because they were seriously repeating this shit well into the 1990s, and it was this scene here where Buck is wearing a dinner jacket and doing a dance where you have to keep one hand on a postbox at all times while Erin Grey jumps about in a bad afro.

So fuck you, BSG and your disposable women sex robots and men making anatomically correct sex dolls in the image of their dead teenage daughters - you'll never top that.

lay off Detroit - them people is livin' in Mad Max times

I am actually running out of pages of Frank to put up thanks to my encounter with RSI, but hopefully I can continue to draw more quite soon and continue to baffle all who wonder why I still bother.

This page was sort of prompted by my meeting an old schoolfriend while out shopping and thinking "I thought I knew all of Lisa's sisters, which one is that with h-- oh NOOOO" as she was shopping with her daughter, who was now something like thirty five - okay, more like 12 or something, but tall (1), and not 'child like' and I thought less along the lines of "haha it's because I haven't seen either of them in a while" and more along the lines of "I will be dead soon."
But in fairness, she did have her first child while she was still in school - actually that is technically incorrect as she had her child after she was in school as she got kicked out of school for being pregnant - but she doesn't look old enough to be a mum is what I'm saying, and a recurring trope in my writing - in Frank especially - seems to be teenage mums. I'm pretty sure it's probably healthier to have recurring tropes like 'lesbians' and 'machine guns' when you're a bloke, but here we are.

A thing to take away from this page is not that I am suggesting only boffins and the moral elite read the Guardian and/or watch Star Trek, but rather that those who do tend towards a self-awareness that leads to depression, or at the very least an awareness of how little they can influence the world around them and this in turn leads to depression sooner or later. To me this is not actually a good thing. I have a mate - a Trek fan equal to myself, if not even more enthusiastic - who's a teacher in that there London and it takes huge toll on him because he's a bit of a thinker, and thinking don't lead to nothing good. It's unhealthy.
Back with the comics commentary, the Irish accent is laughably thick here, but still restrained compared to the real thing. "The one with Kirk fightin' the big lizard" is of course the original Star Trek - specifically the episode Arena, which I consider one of the finest hours of television ever made and will knife-fight in a pit of tigers with any man, woman or beast that tries to suggest otherwise. "The one with the black fella and Mr Wolf" is of course the magnificently flawed DS9, which took 1990s Trek's disturbing trend of regression and made it a virtue because it was portrayed as something inherently wrong rather than something admirable, a lesson which sadly didn't last into Star Trek: Voyager or Enterprise as those shows went back to fetishising women and pre-racial 1950s American values and societal structures as the default state of intelligent beings the universe over, while DS9 went the route of fetishising an Eastern Europe of civil wars, death camps and racial tensions and gave us a Mr Worf as less the one-note joke he was in Next Generation and instead an entertainingly sexist homiocidal xenophobe who was a pleasure to watch even when he's on trial for the mass murder of civilians. It also turned the one-off TNG aliens-of-the-week Cardassians from a footnote into the definitive bastards of the Trek universe, so evil that in the final episode when the shape-shifting Founders ordered the genocide of the Cardassian population I not only laughed, I thought they had it coming. DS9 was a flawed, stagey period piece, but it's easily as good as Trek got after the original series.
The Irish Times, for those not in the know, is pretty much the Irish version of the Guardian, by which I mean it is a paper created by overeducated liberals for the express purpose of annoying people who watch Top Gear. I also feel I am not harsh enough in my opinion of Hollyoaks on this page, so to be clear: I hate it beyond reason.

Toodles for the moment. Hopefully I'll be back at the blogging soon.



(1) 'tall' in this context meaning taller than me, which means pretty much everyone except Tom Cruise.

I wouldn't go to this toilet with my big sister's toe

Still RSI'd to buggery, chaps, but I'm checking in for the weekly does of "Will it ever start doing something other than blathering at me in a crudely-illustrated fashion?" webstrip Frank, seeing as I have that already drawn up (mostly).
I thought RSI was a bollocks made-up thing like Yuppie Flu and Cat AIDS (both real), but for once it's not laziness that stops me getting any work done, I am genuinely not able to sit down at the pc and use the tablet or mouse. My fingers are tingling just from using the laptop's trackpad - which I despised long before now and still do. Anyway...

I just sort of rushed through the colour on this and assumed I'd get back to it later (obviously I have not had that opportunity thanks to recent events), which is why the tones are wonky and the shot of Cookstown's Chapel/Church Street (it's one or the other depending what religeon you are - no, really) looks a bit like Los Angeles to my eyes. Which it should, because Cookstown is the Los Angeles of Mid Ulster, and I'm not just saying that because we have a crack problem and drive by shootings, I'm saying that in jest because it is not true.
For some reason I never got around to dropping that cutaway visual at the end, but at the time, a recurring theme in Frank (as was) was the lies and ignorance that hold communities together, and nothing to my mind said Big Fat Lie like an episode of the Jeremy Kyle Show, in which an equivalence is drawn on a daily basis between the terms "scum of humanity" and "working class" by a smug ferret-like being in a suit whose face I should like to punch with fists made of broken glass and rusty nails. Regardless, the joke may not really work but thematically it's justified enough for inclusion.

TTFN.

Harrison Ford is irradiating our testicles with microwave satellite transmissions

Back to work for Bryan, RSI or not. Got some deadlines coming up and the drugs they give you on the NHS really aren't up to the job, so may as well get my shit done. Albeit slowly.

Frank continues, though towards what end who can possibly say? Well, I can, obviously, but I'll make you read it anyway.

Haha - Tweeting. Because that is what the kids do now.
If indeed you still do read this and haven't given up already, today marks the appearance of a dirty stinking southerner because I thought "you know what this strip needs? More badly-realised Irish accents." It's based on an actual accent, but vague enough to just be ex-Dublin-ish-kind-of-sort-of. I have taken a minor artistic liberty by not including the traditional bulletproof stab vests worn by our local coppers as part of the uniform, as I figure that tends to draw the mind towards what I'm deliberately trying not to draw the focus of the strip towards (the fact that we had a great time for a few decades shooting and bombing the shit out of each other), and though I'm coming around to the idea that I should include it anyway, this will probably happen with later pages when I'm up to drawing for more than a few minutes at a time. Bit late to edit this one as it's been in the bag a while and I need to get the daily post up.

Check the method from Bedrock, cause I rock ya head to bed just like rockin what? Twin glocks.

So this is why everyone recommends having pages 'in the bank' before embarking on any webcomic publishing schedule - so illness like what I have at the moment doesn't get in the way of a regular update.

Not that it matters, as nothing much has happened so far, has it?
I originally 'coloured' this page with halftone dots, but changed it to old-school UK comic half-colour on top of that because I liked the look of Jimmy Corcoran's Kid Tiger webstrip, and this page being a flashback, an old-school vibe kind of works for it. I'll probably not use the effect for all the flashbacks in the strip, as there's a couple of deliberate art homages in flashbacks planned for down the line that may be humourous should the idea of seeing a man fail to draw like Joe Kubert and Carlos Ezquerra appeal to you. And why would it not?

that's my favorite type of movie - that and anything set against the backdrop of competitive cheerleading

Dang but I hate this RSI crap, mainly because it's not just confined to my wan- erm, my drawing hand, it's the left hand as well, and general all-over pains that seem to emanate from the bones in my fingers but move about so's there's time when it settles in my elbows. If I had to rate this on a list of my most annoying brushes with ill health, I'd place it above kidney stones, but below that thing I did to myself near my balls that one time that needed surgery. That one really sucked.
So very little in the way of drawing has been done today, and I haven't even bothered attempting to fix today's page of Frank, hence the huge swathes of nothing but default photoshop brushes quickly wafted across the page, and what I would personally describe as "hoof hands" going on.

The dead bloke I think looked exactly like that in the thumbnails - I just drew a square with little hairs on it to denote hands. The mud looks terribly bright, too, but this is actually a rough approximation of an old drinking spot from my hometown that has fallen into disuse of late as anyone who'd likely use it is now old enough (14-15) to drink in a bar instead.

I don't think you should open with "yay black kids"

A quick stop off in some visceral urban horror as I remember something promised weeks ago to someone - in my defence, for me three weeks late is practically punctual.
But oh crap the colour balance between my two monitors is waaaaay off - I have no idea what this stuff actually looks like as an end product, I am realising. That is not good.

Speaking of not good, more aimless comics from me:

Will anything ever happen? The evidence so far suggests not.

I don't know what they were doing, but it looked like dad was winning

Editing pages I stayed up all night to draw at the moment.

You wouldn't think you'd need to do much fixin'-uppin' on artwork you churned out while half asleep at five in the morning watching Space 1999 repeats, would you?
Yet here we are.

Frank #3:

I have a habit of dropping random and verbatim quotes into longform stories to amuse myself but most likely baffle everyone else, and "people need to be entertained..." is a quote from the ever-watchable Ed O'Neill's borderline mentalist Glen, as appearing in the first Wayne's World movie. Hey, I didn't say I only quoted good films, like.
It also looks like the bear is aware of events, which I admit would be setting up a far more entertaining bear-based massacre comic for the blog, yet would probably violate my rule about not having "spaceships, guns, or fights" which it only occurs to me now is little different from Smallville's "no fights, no tights" rule that the show's producers introduced on day one despite the fact those involved are making a show about Superman.
Smallville is mental television, isn't it? I can safely say I haven't watched an episode of it sober in the last five years and while that kept the need to shout at the screen at bay for a while, it didn't ever actually stop me noticing what a gobshite Clark Kent is. The show ends this year and supposedly the money shot it's been building up to is when we get to finally see Superman in a tv show about Superman, but having watched it from day one, the only money shot that would actually make the remotest lick of sense at this stage would be if Lex and Clark kiss and then make out for ten minutes before the credits roll.

In other news, God damn it, Cartoon Network, don't I have enough cartoons to watch already? Putting Christopher F Lee in something is just not playing fair.

Americans giving Mexicans diarrhea? What the hell is going on?

Weekend - bored and I slept too much. Also babysat.
People will tell you kids are a treasure and they are lying. Kids are a job like any other, especially when they aren't your own so you haven't managed to work out the balance between everything else you're supposed to be doing that day and filling their time with something other than fighting or setting stuff on fire. It also creeps up on you that your conversations with them have changed somewhere along the line from favorite Disney character (usually one of the princesses) to "you know how in dreams the people you dream about think they're real? How do you know that you're not being dreamed by someone else who's dreaming that you think you're real?"
I do not recall having these conundrums at 8 - my main concern at that time was figuring out the best way to set Star Wars toys on fire - so like a trooper I went about figuring out the best way to condense solipsism into the most basic sentence so there was no ambiguity as to what was being said and then I said she should ask her mum.

And so to another week of slowly chipping away at the GN beast, and another page of Frank in which still nothing happens.
This suffers from me trying to simplify to a more cartoony look, but ideally when doing that you have to take great liberties with perspective, anatomy - all the stuff that you're supposed to be taking pains to get right and which I can barely draw convincingly as it is. I did eventually abandon the attempt about 8 pages in, so I found my way in the end.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did once set about trying to fake a bear sighting in my home town, but I drank really heavily at the time. A long term project outside work in THE FACTORY was practically unthinkable - no way was I together enough for that shit. I stuck with underage drinking in the end, and it's made me the man I am today.

a total shambles of really poor material by untested creators

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.

I will beat you and there will be nothing madcap or wacky about it

Battle makes a man! The gates of confrontation have opened!

Doodledoodledoodle...
Slowly getting there on various projects. Not much to say beyond that...
Haven't really thought this whole 'daily posting' thing through, have I? Eh.

Watching: 90210, Good Wife, Harry's law, Fairly Legal, The Listener, Bob's Burgers, Human Target, Smallville, The Cape, Outcasts, Bedlam, Justified, Andromeda.

The Listener I thought canceled a couple of years ago, but here it is, back on screens - a Toronto-based drama about a paramedic with the ability to read minds, it's not great but it fills a hole.
As for Fairly Legal I am done with you, legalese twentysomething life drama. May no man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever, such is thy corniness and trite worldview.
Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda is a bit dated in its CGI spaceship doings, but at least has the odd bit of ambition in amongst the otherwise formulaic plots. I have a soft spot for Tyr "no, he really is a rotten scumbag with no redeeming virtues" Anasazi and the unashamedly old-fashioned character Rev, a cannibal rapist who's turned over a new leaf. It reminds me a lot of what I thought Farscape was probably like before I actually started watching it, but there's a nice bit of curve-balling in setting up Hercules: the Legendary Journeys actor Kevin Sorbo as an infallible Captain Kirk-alike only to reveal flaws as time goes on so that there's actually a story to tell about the character every now and then, and even - garsp! - some long-game storytelling if you pay attention to background details in the early episodes. I'm actually quite surprised I like it, as it's chocka with cliche and corndog moments. I'm probably just getting older and less discerning.

If you leave the house looking for someone to stick their finger up your arse, then whatever it is you're doing you're doing it wrong

You think, uh, maybe I could get my dick back?

Around these parts when you go to see your GP on a busy day, you get whoever has the free time now that there are a lot of Portugese financial migrants knocking about. I'm not complaining about this because they usually have a squad of kids in tow and it makes sense to come here and use our health service with a reasonable track record where negligent homocide is concerned, and Portugal is a shithole - by getting those members of its population smart enough to leave we 're improving our stock while also hopefully hastening the micro-apocalypse that will swallow that backwater so we can send the troops in to mop up and then open a Disneyland.
Anyway, I'm rambling in what is essentially a very short story: when I went to see a doctor about The Toilet Blood Problem, instead of my regular GP I got Doctor Brown. Haha - do you see? I had to get someone to stick their finger up my arse and his name was Doctor Brown.


Aye, essentially what this story tells you is that I am still 8 years old.

He knew you needed to catch the fish and I needed to throw them back

Sad news that Ingrid Pitt has passed away today at the pretty decent innings of 73 years. Probably best known for her turn in cinematic classic the Wicker Man, a film so good even the remake turned out pretty great*, she also had the odd turn in Hammer vehicles and is probably best remembered for carrying the entire film as nympho nutter Countess Bathory in Hammer's Countess Dracula, which I rewatched this evening after hearing of her passing.




* This is a lie.

"Communication in this team has gone from four bars to no signal."

Watching Blue Bloods 1.09 and it's sneering comic book rapist/murderer, I realised what I'd like to see on telly: a show about cops dealing with supervillains. No superheroes or anything, just a cop show about regular, grounded cops and their life dramas who just happen to have a day job tracking down guys that use robot monkeys, earthquake guns, or laser satellites to commit crimes. I hear good things about Gotham Central, a comic book along just these lines about the world's most singularly incompetent police force as they stumble around waiting for a violent transvestite to solve all their problems for them. Should probably check that out sometime.