This unexpected pleasantness is unsettling

I don't fancy talking about how I hated The Cloverfield Paradox because it was complete and utter trash, so instead I'll tell you why I loved Death Race 4: Beyond Anarchy because it was complete and utter trash.  I had a beer in the fridge so I ordered a pizza and I watched this and it was fuckin great.



The laws of diminishing returns for sequels have well and truly set in by this stage, and it's not a patch on either Paul "Wank Shaft" Anderson's Death Race remake of 2008, its unloved (but okay) sequel starring - I shit you not - Luke Goss as Frankenstein, and I can't remember a single thing about the third one so that's likely not a good sign, but this fourth one is actually a bit of a hoot despite a sixth form script, looking like a tv movie, and starring Zack McGowan - who I have nothing against, but he tends not to make good choices when it comes to roles.  Maybe a bit predictable - there are at least three twists you'll guess from the opening moments despite their not being signposted in any way throughout the film - but if you're a member of the disgusting bourgeois classes and find yourself well fed and no longer sober, this is a great throwback to the low-budget post-apocalyptic racers of the 1980s which is uhhhhhhh a genre I am somewhat invested in at the moment.
Like other entries in the DR remake saga, it does have this bizarre line in misogyny that I cannot for the life of me figure out - it's so blatantly tacked on and in your face it has to be a deliberate commentary on boy racer culture, but this would mean this pile of trashy trash is somehow punching above its intellectual weight despite its low ambitions, something I would have expected more from...
Death Race 2050, a dumb as fuck sequel to the dumb as fuck original Death Race 2000, which was remade as Death Race in 2008, but this is the sequel to the original Death Race 2000, to which the 2008 remake was a prequel, understand?  They do actually kind of line up, especially with the franchise-linking premise of Frankenstein being an identity maintained by the winners of the Death Race so that they can enjoy his infamy and the government can continue to use him as a poster boy for their dystopian society which enshrines euthanasia-by-car, and while this is pretty enjoyable trash, every time an actor you recognise comes onto the screen, it just seems like they can do better - yes, even Manu Bennett.



It's every inch a Roger Corman joint, though, looking very cheap and taking a series of easy shots in the script, and while its satirical targets betray higher ambitions, it neither tries nor pretends to be anything other than a cheap cash-in to the more successful series of Paul WS Anderson-produced DR remakes.  Probably more fun if - like me - you enjoy the overlap in the low-budget action and sci-fi genres and don't mind something that is often painfully cheap-looking.

Being a good Catholic sounds expensive

Well, here we are, a full week into the New Year of 2019, and my New Year's Resolutions are going great.  As ever, I have taken the advice of losers on the social medias not to make resolutions that might be difficult so that if I fail I won't feel sad, as opposed to the totally wrong way that people usually do these things by making resolutions that require effort and so when you succeed you will feel happy.  This year sees the coming of the Brexitpocalypse so nobody gets to feel happy.  Everyone suffers and we will put a brave face on it as the world burns in the finest traditions of the British Empire.  We ran out of foreign soil to salt, so now it's coming home.
Anyway, my resolutions are:
1 - put on weight
2 - exercise less
3 - deteriorate my mental health
4 - fail to secure any work as a comics artist
5 - not carry out my long-threatened and meticulously planned flamethrower attack on a schoolyard
and I fully expect to be able to succeed at all four of these resolutions in the coming year.  Perhaps 2019 will be the year I finally manage to soil myself as a grown adult, as I seem alone among my peers in not having performed this apparently commendable rite of passage.  I picture one day there will be made a film along the lines of The 40 Year Old Virgin, except instead of hesitantly admitting to his friends that he has never blown his love trumpet in a lady's love orchestra, the lead character will disclose that never once as a grown adult has he drank so many tins of Carling Black Label lager that his hungover arse emptied into his jeans at the breakfast table during an ill-advised venture aimed at quietly breaking wind and blaming it on the dog.  Maybe this year is my year.  I know Brexitpocalypse is coming, you guys, but God Damn It, a man can still dream and in the Brexitpocalypse this might be the only dream I still stand a chance of achieving.

I'm going back to work - reality tv is boring and I've given up trying to follow Westworld

Welp
That was a nice break from blogging, but sadly it's back to business as usual.
Not much has transpired on the old "personal success in my chosen field" front in the year I have been away from filling out the blog pages, but luckily I have always considered my frank admissions of professional failure to be one of the main draws here on the YFaN blog for those happy to see someone's slide into destructive depression play out in real time - and given the success of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror over the last few years, apparently that's a considerably larger audience than I once assumed - and if you're scouring the internet looking for posts from failed and depressed comic artists, then who am I to deny you?
I probably should have made more of an effort to have something to post about in this, the debut blather of 2019, but when I say it's back to business as usual, I really mean it: rambling, incoherent, often pointless, mostly bitter and entitled - if my posts were anything else, would you even recognise them?  I know I wouldn't.

His wife went into premature labor and blah, blah, blah

Just in case any among the 14 regular weekend visitors who seem to be reading War Cars when I can be bothered to post it are interested, here's some old War Cars line art I found in my travels because yes I am still doing this.
Eagle-eyed readers will spot where the art that appeared in the actual comic was changed from the original linework you see here, presumably because the editors at the time didn't think anyone would really believe an artist from 1983 would have been quite so technically incompetent and it might be an idea to have another pass at it so it appeared more convincing...ly the work of someone from that era.
No, I don't know why I still bother, either, but here we are.

The monkey is unpredictable - you never know when he's going to demand intercourse

For some reason I decided to watch the Dirty Harry series and it was largely a good decision as some of them are good action films - especially Magnum Force's inventive chases - though my main takeaway was the fantastic Lalo Schifrin scores, even if they were a diminishing returns kind of thing as synth music became more permissible between 1972 and 1988 and the snazzy, jazzy, dirty guitar riffs phased out to be replaced with an array of other contemporary sounds.
Also decided to start watching Rizzoli & Isles, which was a terrible decision.  Stupid, hateful, and often sadistic, it's the kind of show a 13 year-old would create if they found themselves in a writer's room by accident and decided to roll with it like that Guy who wandered into the wrong interview on the BBC that time, only that was fun and didn't leave you hating the world and yourself in that order like Rizzoli & Isles does.  The show also describes the theory that criminal behavior is genetic as "scientific", so there's that, too.

One day I'll try lettuce, but not today

Today I applied a lick of undercoat to the walls of the back room.  It said "Eggshell White" on the tin and it only took about a half hour to do all four walls.  Afterwards, I sat back and watched as the damp areas of paint lightened in colour as time passed, though the strong smell of paint remained in the air as this happened.  Right after that, I watched Unfriended, which was considerably less interesting than what I had been doing up to that point DO YOU SEE?

Reading is for morons what can't understand pictures

You know, I think people don't give Donald Trump the credit he deserves for being genuinely good at what he does - it isn't acting, business, or politics, it's selling the fantasy that he isn't the punchline to capitalism, and that his crazy, unworkable pipe-dreams aren't the mad delusions of a racist idiot.  America is looking like it might get interesting again, or at the very least it looks like it's gearing up to give fascism or socialism a punt in the next few years, which I imagine will be great for its creative industries if the younger types (mid-30s to early 50s) finally have something to rail against.

It was all for the best. All of it.

Music is resonance, vibration, and energy, and resonance, vibration, energy: these are the foundation of our plane of existence, composed as it is of protons and neutrons orbiting and vibrating in so perfect a synchronicity that they hold close and sustain each other across the lifespan of our universe (whatever that may turn out to be).  That vibration and resonance is the music that holds all things together, and it's hard to escape a suspicion that somehow the Goblin King tapped into that form of music like he did so many others and became a part of it, because he feels like he's everywhere.
It seems at the very least rude to say - on this of all days - that I am not a David Bowie fan, but it's the truth: I was not a devotee, I didn't know my Hunky Dory from my Black Tie White Noise, I just knew him as a presence in popular culture like Noel Edmonds or something - there, but enigmatic.
Having said that, I think back and I get all the references to him in popular culture, like a scene from The Venture Brothers which uses his lyrics for dialogue, or comic stories that riff on his song titles - I knew what these things were referring to without being told, so perhaps I was a fan all along without acknowledging it, or possibly Bowie has made so much music that has so influenced the world around us that like a bird chirping back a ringtone in a park, some subtle vibration within the world has been altered by the tunes he created and Bowie has now become a part of the DNA of our reality.
When I heard David Bowie had died, I didn't believe it, but the more I thought about it, the more I wonder why I doubted it.  I mean, was I thinking "he can't be dead - he still has so much to do"?  It's David Fucking Bowie we're talking about here, what's he got left to do?  If I'm doubting he died, it's because I suspect he ran out of things to do and turned his hand to another bit of reinvention.  I choose to believe that, then - that he has not left us, he's got back into his music.

Love don't mix with this pimpin' man!

Because a man cannot live on hate alone - God knows I have tried - I have put some work up on Comicsy that you can pay for if you fancy.  No, I don't fully understand this concept of giving someone money in exchange for their creative work either and I'm not sure it'll catch on, but I've done it anyway so never let it be said that I won't try new things.

The creative work in question is a restoration of the first 21 pages (five chapters) of mid-80s toy tie-in comic War Cars, which you might remember I mentioned here on the blog on the first of Apr-- erm, back at the start of April this year.  I have made no secret of my affection for old UK comics and this project has been prompted by that, specifically Ian Rimmer and Simon Fuman's utterly bonkers Zoids run, as well as elements of Furman's Transformers comics from around the same time.  If you like the thought of a post-apocalyptic Whacky Races-type scenario, have £1.99 to spare and don't fancy waiting around until it turns up on scanning sites so you can read it for free, perhaps you might give it a try?

War Cars Collected 001 is available as a .PDF, .CBZ or .CBR for download to e-readers, tablets, and Borg Distribution Nodes HERE.