...when your Elvis dies, so does the private lie that someday you will be young once again, and feel at capricious intervals the weightlessness of a joy that is unchecked by the injuries of experience and failure

And with today's entry, I clock up my 1000th post on the blog!
I have wasted my life.

Watching: because it's Halloween at the end of the month...
Extreme Ghostbusters Back In The Saddle parts 1 and 2 - I don't think I've ever seen any of Extreme Ghostbusters until this point, but the episodes where they team up with the original characters from the 1980s cartoon-of-the-film seemed to be the ones to check out.  Seems a bit anemic compared to other 1990s cartoons like Batman, Superman, Gargoyles, Invasion America, or even the shallow but eventful Spider-Man and X-Men offerings, with the characters rather thin and the plots a bit messy.  I think it relies on familiarity with storytelling tropes alongside stereotypical characters so the audience can fill in the odd blank in the script from their own viewing experience, and the overall effect is quite charmless.  The visual design also lacks consistency, not helped by cheap animation.
The Snow Creature - a 1954 b-movie picture about some blokes finding an abominable snowman and trying to cash in by returning it to civilization - things go downhill from there.  You can find this on Youtube if you fancy, but it's not really worth it, lacking any nuance or charm and being a cheapo riff on the basic plot of King Kong.
Dark Moon Rising - "I am Dance.  We have literature together."  A film about werewolves with superpowers, including one who shouts out the name of every kung fu move he's about to bust on someone's ass, the most ridiculous thing about it nevertheless remains to be that that it stars Eric Roberts and I still thought it might be good.  When Roberts' character has a Vietnam War flashback in which he is attacked by werewolves, I decided that this may very well be one of the most amazing(ly terrible) films I have ever seen, elevating creative incompetence to levels I would not have thought possible when I awoke this morning.

Hashtag the Hell out of him

I didn't want to run this bit of filler for reasons that I would hope would be plainly obvious to those with functioning eyes and a basic knowledge of how things like art and lettering are supposed to work, but I don't have anything else to run in its place so here we are.  Written by Al Ewing before he started slumming it writing Judge Dredd and Avengers comics for money so he could finally do all those things he'd dreamed of like eating each day, if I had half an ounce of sense I'd try and pass off my contribution as the result of this being done back in 1978 or something, but instead I must cop to it being a more recent 2007-ish vintage so you can at least believe I've wised up a bit.
Should you against all reason still want to see artwork by the person who committed the above, it can be found in the Something Wicked omnibus from FutureQuake Press for e-readers and tablets, and which includes much-better illustrated stories written by Al, such as personal favorite The Big If, a neat alternate history tale for anyone with a passing knowledge of the American comic book scares of the 1950s, though it also works just as well if you know Fanny Adams about such things.

Who better than an accupuncturist... TO KILL WITH ACCURATE PUNCTURES?

Another old strip - also scripted by writing machine Lee Robson - just to keep the Halloween thing going.
If you liked this, why not buy some more of its ilk from FutureQuake Press?  We promise we won't hold it against you if you do.

If I cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again

 

I haven't actually posted this before, so this is likely the first of many appearances it will make: presenting another spooOOooOOooky tale for Halloween, The Thing in the Window was written up by my writing mule Lee Robson when I was between drawing gigs, and is so frightening it made me never want to use Adobe Photoshop for art ever again.  Okay, admittedly that might have had just as much to do with the fact that Manga Studio has some purdy line correction options built into the pen tool for use with vector layers that practically draws things for you and makes mistakes look like part of your artwork - you can see the attraction of that from my point of view.  This is the story that killed bitmaps, I guess, but if you liked it and would like to see more from Lee and myself , check out the Something Wicked omnibus collection for e-readers like iPad and Android - though I guess it'll work on Kindle, too, as long as you don't mind contributing to the destruction of digital comics distribution, the bullying of authors, tax dodging, and the erosion of workers' rights.

We both know I'm borderline creepy

My recycling old strips as blog filler is something regular readers are well-used to by now (yes, I do have regular readers - I'm likely more surprised at this than you are), but on this occasion it's all in a good promotional cause, as FutureQuake Press have released a Something Wicked omnibus for digital readers, featuring artwork such as that above - that I would rather never have seen the light of day ever again but hey at least it's not the werewolf story - and also some much more assured contributions from others too numerous to copy and paste here, many of whom went on to stuff like 2000ad and some monthly with the word "Avengers" in the title put out by indy auteurs Marvel leaving their lazier small press comrades like me scratching our bollocks and wondering where we went wrong in our lives.
140 superhero-free pages of original content for 2 pounds could only be better value if they were giving it away, but we aren't communists yet so dig deep and help support independent comics this Halloween!  Alternatively, anti-democratic tax-dodging slave-driving multinational Amazon probably have some Batman graphic novels you could buy for around the same price, which I am sure is exactly the same thing.